Meeting You Is A View to a Kill: Roger Moore does NOT go out on a win

Sean Connery wrapped up his original run as Bond with a flawed but fun film, Diamonds Are Forever. Then he had a better goodbye in Never Say Never Again. Poor Roger Moore got one farewell film, and A View to a Kill is dreadful (cover art, like all art used here, belongs to current rights holders).
View is a remake of Goldfinger starring Christopher Walken as Zorin, a former KGB agent placed in Western capitalism but now out for his own profit. Where Goldfinger planned to boost the value of his gold by nuking Fort Knox, Zorin plans to create a silicon-chip monopoly by destroying Silicon Valley with an artificial earthquake. It’s a workable concept for a Bond film, but it goes wrong at every step.
The opening, like Goldfinger, concerns smuggling—in this case, computer chips going from Zorin’s company to the Soviet Union. And these chips can build computers that can withstand an EMP! In a nuclear war, the Soviets can keep their computers going!
This kind of thinking was very Cold War (it’s the sort of thing Dr. Strangelove parodied with talk of a “mineshaft gap”) but it’s not a terribly gripping hook (and wasn’t even then), compared to, say, stealing nuclear submarines.
The Villain: Walken plays Zorin as a sociopathic little kid, and plays it well, but it’s not enough to make for a great villain (Gert Frobe’s Goldfinger and Never Say Never’s Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) both make better foes). A bigger problem is his backstory as the ultimate achievement of a Nazi geneticist now working for the USSR (the idea Nazis all went to work for Russia after WW II was a popular one back in the Cold War. Unsurprisingly, nobody pointed out the US recruited just as many of them). His genes supposedly make him a super-genius with a side effect of complete sociopathology, but nothing in the movie other than laughing maniacally reflects this. He’s no smarter than any other Bond villain, and several of them contemplated bigger body counts.Plus, as some critics have pointed out, it’s not like Zorin can really help himself. The evil’s in his Nazi genes, so why blame him?
The good girl: I have long considered Tanya Roberts the sexiest of Charley’s Angels in the original series, absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, she’s also the worst actor. Lois Chiles in Moonraker is wooden, but she seems to understand acting as a concept. Roberts, not so much. And her wispy voice grates even when she’s not screaming (but then, she screams a lot). Bad, bad, bad, bad casting choice.
•The bad girl. Grace Slick as Zorin’s lover/bodyguard Mayday falls into the same category as Fatima Bush (Never Say Never) and Onatop (Goldeneye), combining Bond Girl with the Oddjob/Jaws Brute Man role. She commits murder and laughs about it; later, she makes love to Bond, rolling him over so she’s on top. That bit of sexual dominance would normally set up for Bond to either overwhelm her sexually (happily, he doesn’t) or for a final showdown with a little more edge than usual.
Instead, like Jaws in Moonraker, Mayday switches sides when she discovers Zorin has killed her team (collateral damage to setting off the big quake) and abandoned her to the same fate (“I thought he loved me!”). Which would work fine if she’d then joined Bond in hunting Zorin down for revenge, but instead she sacrifices herself to avert the explosion. That noble sacrifice doesn’t seem at all in character and some critics found it quite discomfiting—Bond can’t dominate the Angry Black Woman, so she just blows herself up, removing her from the equation (though I doubt there’s any ending that wouldn’t have had awkward overtones).
Moore isn’t my favorite Bond, but he deserved a better swan song than this.