Roger Moore had now been playing Bond for over a decade, and despite wanting to retire from the part for a while was persuaded to return one more time for 1985’s A View To A Kill. At 57 years old, and starting to look it, could Moore bring that magical twinkle to the screen one last time, wonders Greg D Smith?

It’s been a long road, this. Sixteen movies in and we have seen the sublime, the ridiculous and everything in-between, and it’s become increasingly surprising to me that this franchise continues to persist and arguably thrive in the 21st Century. That said, I’ve been confused, enthralled, baffled and horrified to varying degrees so far in this epic Bond-a-Thon, but to this point I had never been bored…

A View To A Kill sorted that out nicely though. It’s a screamingly dull clunker of a thing, which meanders along through its 131 minutes run time, gently bouncing from one unrelated plot point to the next as it gives us the most convoluted and frankly inane Bond yet.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way – yes, Moore here is looking his age. Really. In Octopussy it was becoming clearer that the star was not up to the more physical demands of the role, and that the action sequences had been tailored around that limitation. Here, it’s even clearer that Moore simply wasn’t up to any of the stunt work at all, meaning a series of contrived costume choices deployed to (badly) hide the identity of the various stuntmen deployed in Moore’s place. The result is cumbersome, with action scenes that ask the viewer not so much to suspend as to completely detach their sense of disbelief altogether.

But even at 57 years of age, Moore still had that air of quiet, relaxed confidence, that easygoing charm which had already made him an icon. Surely if you could just get past a few dodgy stunt doubles then there would be plenty to enjoy here? Well, no, not really.

It doesn’t help that the script feels as if it was literally being written day by day on the fly. Various scenes feel basically smashed together with no real sense of a narrative throughline or coherence to connect them. The origin of Christopher Walken’s villain shifts through so many cliches as to transcend the general level of Bond silliness towards outright parodical absurdity. He’s a billionaire tycoon. Oh he’s a Nazi experiment who still knocks around with the Nazi scientist who created him. He’s a sociopath. He’s an agent trained by the KGB. Now he’s a rogue ex-KGB operative. Sure. I’m just amazed the screenwriter managed to restrain themselves from having him be the real gunman behind the Grassy Knoll, in all honesty.

And that’s just the beginning of the issues. We start off with a microchip, designed to be resistant to electromagnetic pulses. The sort of detail you’d think might be relevant to the ongoing plot of the thing, but no, the only relevance is that the chip was made by Zorin industries, government contractor and company of Walken’s antagonist Max Zorin. The fact of the chip and its specific capabilities, which you might expect to form the basis of a typical Bond plot, are never brought up again. That’s because next the film moves onto horse racing, which Zorin also invests in. Somehow his horses are always winning, even though they seem to be from ‘inferior’ bloodlines (horse racing being one of those areas in which this kind of eugenicist sentiment is still perfectly acceptable) and of course it turns out that’s because he’s cheating. Being the stealthily trained KGB operative who’s managed to conceal his Nazi origins, I’m sure Max will have a cunning plan to throw investigators off the scent and… oh no wait, he’s sent his massive, incredibly distinctive bodyguard to murder the private detective investigating him in a very public place. Then he tries to murder Bond by having him ride a horse over a bizarre obstacle course pursued by Zorin himself and many of his henchmen. Oh, and then it turns out that horses are really nothing to do with the plot either.

The real plot (no, really) revolves around geology. Ish. Max wants to become the world’s sole supplier of microchips. To do this, he must apparently wipe out Silicon Valley, the world’s pre-eminent supplier of microchips. At this stage, one might ask why this was necessary given that the film established early that his company had created a new type of microchip that had unique properties and would presumably be able to corner the market anyway. But that’s the sort of thinking that doesn’t really work in a Bond movie like A View To A Kill. Villains gonna villain, so Max must carry out an elaborate plan whereby he sets off explosives beneath two major lakes to trigger off geological faults and submerge all of Silicon Valley forever. Presumably rather than relocate any operations elsewhere following this natural disaster, all of the billionaires behind the alley will simply resign themselves to Zorin becoming the sole supplier of microchips forever.

In terms of the Bond Girls, the movie remains as oddly conflicted and uneven as everywhere else. Three main conquests occur for our intrepid hero. KGB Agent Pola Ivanova crosses paths with 007 as she attempts to spy on Zorin with an ill-fated comrade she promptly forgets about five minutes after he’s been brutally executed for the opportunity to hop in bed with 007 before hightailing it away with her intel, which Bond has of course switched. This prompts not, as you might imagine, righteous fury on the part of Ivanova and her boss General Gogol, but rather a sort of bemused defeat, the sort you might expect from the star of a Seventies sitcom as a result of an unruly pet.

Second on the list is Grace Jones’ May Day, Zorin’s impressively statured bodyguard-cum-assassin. This is a weird one even without the weirdness one generally associates with Jones, an ever enigmatic figure. It’s never one hundred per cent clear what Zorin’s relationship is with May Day. They would appear to be lovers as well as boss and employee, but also it’s clear that Zorin has no real affection for her even before he abandons her to die in the mines, casually passing her off to Bond to sleep with him without any apparent bother. For her part, May Day happily sleeps with Bond despite the fact she and Zorin have literally just been searching for him to try to kill him because… he asks nicely? It’s perhaps one of the weirdest seductions Bond has ever managed, luring a woman clearly stronger and more physically dangerous than he is into bed through the power of sheer brass neck in the face of her wanting to actually kill him.

Third up, and the main ‘Bond Girl’ of the piece, is geologist Stacey Sutton, a woman the script has flitting from competent and brave to screaming damsel and back again throughout the course of the movie. Having established her relationship to Zorin (he tries to buy her off to take her father’s oil business), the movie never really seems to know what to do with Stacey from scene to scene, so it resorts to using her as a kind of walking talking plot device, there to do whatever might help nudge things along a bit, without ever really giving us any sense of agency for her. Worse, when she does inevitably fall into bed with Bond at the end of the movie, there’s no real concrete reason for her to do so.

As far as stunts go, there’s definitely some memorable ones, including the jump from the Eiffel Tower and the chase through the streets of Paris in a car which is literally bisected, Bond gunning the front half a bit longer in a scene which had left a lasting impression on Young Greg, being the only thing I recalled from a childhood watch. Unfortunately, the decent stunts are somewhat outweighed by the ones which look a bit naff because it’s either something that’s been done as delicately as possible to protect the ageing star or it’s something done with a clear stunt double taking his place.

Patrick Macnee makes perhaps the most ignoble appearance of his onscreen career as Sir Godfrey Tibbett, a horse trainer who Bond takes great delight in humiliating as the two infiltrate Zorin’s horse auction with Tibbett posing as his driver and footman. There’s a suggestion that Bond is doing this to maintain an ongoing cover but there’s also not much sign that Tibbett especially approves and it’s just a little weird to see the former star of The Avengers in such a role. On set legend has it that much of Bond’s ‘condescending’ dialogue to Tibbett was improvised by Moore, taking advantage of Macnee’s initial concern that Broccoli would never cast him in a Bond film after he’d previously and rather publicly lambasted Broccoli for ‘stealing’ Honor Blackman from The Avengers to play Pussy Galore. That may well be true, but it still feels a little mean on screen.

Gadgets wise, the film is actually rather muted, which together with the rather extreme violence lamented by Moore in subsequent years (Zorin and his henchman machine-gunning several dozen people for a few minutes being one particular example) adds to the impression of it almost actively trying not to be a Bond film. Discreet cameras, card swiping devices and bugs and recorders all seem quite tame by the more outlandish standards of the series, and Desmond Llewellyn’s Q, barely seen in the movie, gets the most outlandish gadget in the form of a radio-controlled ‘dog’ he uses to spy on Bond and Stacey at the end of the movie (it having no other apparent purpose).

It’s not really bad enough to get angry about. It pootles along, gently bouncing from one random subplot or piece of narrative to the next with the enthusiasm of a teenager trying to finish an assignment they’re not especially interested in. May Day’s switch at the end is too quick, too odd and too short-lived to feel as if it matters in any way. Walken does his best in one of his more restrained performances but the character he is playing is a sketch, a two-dimensional parody with an incoherent backstory and no real meat to its bones. Moore, for his part, soldiers on as valiantly as possible but it’s clear even in spite of his natural screen presence that he’s not enjoying this one a all, and it’s hard not to think he should have hung up the Walther PPK long before this.

The end of an era then, and one which ends very much with a whimper rather than a bang. Sir Roger Moore’s tenure in the role was the one I mostly associated with the franchise as a child growing up in the 80s, and I don’t think I’ll ever quite lose my estimation of him as ‘my’ Bond, but in the cold light of merciless adulthood, it’s clear that he stayed on at least two films longer than he should have.