MOORE THE MERRIER

‘A View to a Kill’, Roger Moore’s swan song as Bond, is often rated as the worst film of the franchise. But four decades on, does it still warrant its reputation?

- Jonathan Wells

In A View to a Kill, Roger Moore's final spin as James Bond, 007 surveys the corpse of a Parisian private eye, murdered at dinner with a poison-tipped fishing lure. Bond, pan deader than the victim, gravely observes: "There's a fly in his soup." Pause for applause, right? It's pure, unadulterated, unapologetic Bond.

Puns! Death! Fine tailoring! What more could you possibly want?

And yet, 40 years on from its release, A View to a Kill remains the worst-rated, and arguably most hated, official Bond film ever made, scoring a meagre 36 per cent on the reviews aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. It’s also one of only two films in the 25strong franchise ever to be nominated for a Razzie – the other, Die Another Day, is the second-worst-rated on Rotten Tomatoes, though it scored a considerably higher 56 per cent. And that has an invisible car in it.

Admittedly, Bond was in a weird place when A View to a Kill was released. It was Roger Moore’s seventh outing as the secret agent, Eon Productions was rapidly running out of Ian Fleming material to even loosely adapt, and the previous film, 1983’s Octopussy, had attracted mixed reviews. “The Bond wagon crawls along,” wrote Time magazine in its review of that movie. “Roger Moore is not getting any younger,” observed The New York Times.

Yet here we were, with yet another Moore-era Bond releasing into a summer already stuffed with exciting action properties, among them Back to the Future and sequels to Rambo, Rocky and Mad Max. How could Moore keep up? It was the film’s producers who allegedly convinced him to stay, rather than Moore pushing for the return himself.

“I think, of all the Bonds that I did, I liked