Christopher Walken Broke a Bond Movie. Here's How.
1985's A View to a Kill can't stop Christopher Walken from blowing James Bond off the screen, causing the movie to collapse under his awesomeness. Also, those sunglasses are legit.
Lots of people give great performances in James Bond movies. Christopher Walken was so good that he broke the movie.
As Max Zorin In 1985’s A View to a Kill, Walken so thoroughly blows Roger Moore’s James Bond off screen that he upends the film’s good guy-bad guy dynamic. Because Walken is so charming and electric in the role, and because Bond is such a sad, moldy pile of oatmeal, it really feels like the movie doesn’t want Bond to win.
Which is shocking, because, you know, this is a Bond movie.
Here’s how this happened:
1. Zorin’s best friend is Grace Jones
Look at these two. They are clearly having a wonderful time.
As Mayday, Jones spends most of the movie GOING FOR IT WITH EVERY FIBER OF HER BEING and shouting kickass lines while riding giant bombs on railcars. She dresses like a member of the Bene Gesserit and is an expert at murdering people with a fishing pole, Bill Dance style.
Note: I don’t know if Bill Dance has killed someone with a fishing pole. I’m just saying he could. He’s a magician with that thing.
Here’s Bond getting dropped by Mayday’s fishing pole. While her weapon does have a hooked end, she only needs to tangle up Bond in the fishing line to make her escape.
For the world’s greatest spy and a master of the martial arts, getting taken out by a thin piece of plastic isn’t great. He looks like Lucky’s Dad trying to make the save while Bluey and Bingo play Keepy Uppy.
2. How Zorin reacts gleefully as this scale model of Silicon Valley rises out of the table.
Walken just delightfully bad guys his way through his big pitch for world domination. In particular, watch Walken luxuriate in his enthusiasm for this table — the smile, the arms flexing as if to Jedi-force-pull the table upwards—as the scale model ascends. He looks around the room just bristling with a “I’ve got a great rising-scale-model guy, and he did the whole thing for four grand, no problem” type energy.
So much of this movie is Zorin bragging about cool stuff he has—sunglasses, scale models, horses, and the death blimp.
3. OH, DID I MENTION THE DEATH BLIMP?
Zorin’s personalized luxury blimp comes equipped with ample conference space and deluxe accommodations for business and pleasure. It also has a retractable slide that allows people to exit the blimp quickly. Perhaps too quickly, based on this man’s experience.
4. He is a successful businessman despite his complicated childhood.
Family dynamics are challenging. In Zorin’s case, he’s the adopted son of a Nazi scientist who experimented on him to create a genetically enhanced superhuman. We know nothing of Zorin’s actual mother or father, just that he was pumped full of Soviet weightlifter steroids IN UTERO and then adopted by the scientist who did the pumping.
That’s a lot to unpack. Yet Zorin seems to have found closure enough to have a relationship with his adoptive dad. They do a lot of standard father-son stuff together, like riding around in the death blimp and performing unsanctioned medical experiments on horses.
His adoptive father also does the following:
Wears a monocle
Keeps Wile-E-Coyote-style sticks of dynamite in his son’s death blimp, throwing them at James Bond in fits of rage.
What’s Bond doing while Zorin is cruising in a death blimp and wearing cool sunglasses?
Not much that’s impressive. For instance, here he is going all Keystone Cops as he swings from the back of a fire truck. He’s being chased by two regular, no-ejector-seat-or-missile-having police cars through the streets of San Francisco. And he’s not even driving. He’s just hanging there while his lady friend drives.
Look at his face and tell me that’s a man you trust with the future of the free world:
“Hanging on for dear life while someone else drives a firetruck” encapsulates why A View to a Kill falls apart. While Walken and Jones are looking fabulous and crushing it, Bond looks like an out of shape dad at a church softball game. Even when Zorin is defeated in the climax atop the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s really gravity that does our villain in, not Bond.
Walken even giggles as he’s about to fall off the bridge, like he can’t believe Bond beat him.
It’s hard to understand what A View to a Kill is going for. Are you trying to get me to cheer for the maniac who wants to destroy San Francisco? Because you gave him cool sunglasses and a kickass blimp, and you made the other guy frail and inept at run of the mill hero stuff.
It’s like the movie knows that Bond isn’t supposed to win. When Zorin slags on him for being bad at his job — “If you're the best they've got, they're more likely to try and cover up your embarrassing incompetence.”— it doesn’t feel like banter. It feels like a good point.