Roger Moore plays James Bond for the seventh and final time. He looks too old for the role (Q and Moneypenny aren’t getting any younger, either), but despite that it’s a better film than I recalled.
Christopher Walken plays Max Zorin, a demented tycoon who plots to flood and destroy Silicon Valley in order to control the world market in microchips. Grace Jones is his right-hand woman. Unfortunately, she is given almost no dialogue and so spends most of the film merely looking fashionable and angry.
There is a genuinely tense and dramatic finale at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, involving Bond dangling by a rope from an airship, which is not for vertigo sufferers. There’s also a surprisingly brutal scene in which Zorin sprays miners with machine-gun fire while laughing his head off.
Tanya Roberts plays a slightly weedy geologist called Stacey. And Patrick Macnee plays a horse trainer named Sir Godfrey Tibbett.
There are plenty of ridiculous moments, as you’d expect. The most absurd is a motorised iceberg that Bond uses as a boudoir in Siberia. Or maybe it’s when Bond quickly cooks a quiche.
I’m a little saddened that I have now seen all of the films, but at least there’s the forthcoming (much delayed) No Time to Die to look forward to.
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