Starring:
Christopher Walken
Roger Moore
Plot Summary: Christopher Walken is a Bond villain. I don't mean he plays one, I mean he IS one.
Disclaimer: With all due respect to Sir Roger Moore, I can't bring myself to call him James Bond. There will be only one James Bond, and that man is George Lazenby. George brought to the role a solid reliability, almost wooden in strength, and no one else will ever compare.
We open with Roger pulling a microchip off a corpse half-buried in a Siberian glacier. Spotted by a significant portion of the Soviet army, the getaway quickly becomes the modern biathlon of downhill skiing and automatic rifles. Just when the action threatens to get stale, Roger juryrigs a makeshift snowboard and races down the glacier to the tune of the Beach Boys' "California Girls." Twenty years later, the sequence is still as fresh and hip as it was then. Roger escapes in a camouflaged submarine piloted by one Kimberly Jones, played by former Miss World Mary Stavin. To give some sense of the depth of the Bond Girl casting for this film, the producers had a Miss World on hand just to waste on the precredits sequence. They didn't even bother with a double entendre character name. The mind boggles.
After Roger's first sexual conquest, we are free to enjoy the credits sequence. The usual bevy of shadow-obscured naked women provide the backdrop, but for this movie they are lit entirely with blacklights wearing fluorescent paint on their hands and faces. This was intended to deflect any criticisms that Bond credits sequences are too erotic. Duran Duran provides the theme song of the same name in so as to avoid any confusion as to which decade the movie was filmed in.
Once back in England, Roger is briefed by M (Robert Brown as always) on the results of the mission. It would seem that the Soviets have obtained a copy of the UK's new EMP-proof microchip which would make them invulnerable to the casts of both Goldeneye and the Ocean's Eleven remake. They suspect Max Zorin, who in a long proud tradition of vaguely menacing Bond villains is a "leading French industrialist," champion horse breeder, and the sole survivor of a German wartime eugenics experiment to produce highly intelligent children that was cut short because of psychological problems in the subjects.
Zorin is portrayed by the incomparable Christopher Walken (in one of his rare non-dancing roles), whose presence alone makes the film ten times better than all the Sean Connery movies combined. I'm pretty sure there wasn't a man alive in 1985 better suited to play a psychotic Nazi experimental superbaby than Christopher Walken. Embracing the villain role, he dyed his hair blonde and combed it straight back making him 30% crazier looking. He is always with May Day, the most physically intimidating henchman since Jaws. Played by Grace Jones sporting some kind of Wooly Wally hairdo that is in a different shape for each scene and could well be a wig made of modeling clay, May Day is Christopher's personal bodyguard in charge of making him look normal by comparison. The two are lovers as well, which proves once again that black or white, freaky loves freaky.
Roger meets with a man investigating Christopher named Aubergine (played by genuine Frenchman Jean Rougerie) at a swanky Paris club whose headline act features a girl whistling while butterflies on fishing line are dangled from offstage. I suppose I could make a Jerry Lewis comment here, but I feel that is beneath me. May Day replaces one of the danglers and swings a poisoned butterfly into Aubergine's neck, presumably to make it look like a horrible butterfly show accident. Roger spots her and follows her through the back door.
The chase goes up and down the Eiffel Tower (May Day had the presence of mind to wear her basejumping equipment), through the Paris streets (Roger jacks a taxicab and proceeds to lose the roof and back half of the car in successive collisions, but in a tribute to French engineering, is able to pilot the car on the front two wheels alone), and into the Seine, where May Day escapes to Christopher's speedboat where they share a tender maniacal laugh together.
In order to get closer to Christopher, Sir Godfrey provides Roger with an invitation to a horse auction on Christopher's estate. Patrick Macnee, who portrays Sir Godfrey, rose through the fictional British spy ranks during his decade-long service in the Avengers. Roger meets another of Christopher's female bodyguards, except this one is the unambiguously female Jenny Flex (played by future Indiana Jones Nazi Alison Doody). Never out of her equestrian outfit, she and Roger exchange half-hearted double entendres about riding. Surprisingly, she is the only female presence in the movie that Roger does not sleep with. Roger also meets one Stacey Sutton, played by Tanya Roberts of Sheena and Beastmaster fame, a mysterious American who receives a $5,000,000 check from Christopher for an undisclosed reason.
As an aside, to those who think that the ideals of the Bond franchise died out in the 1960s, this places a Miss World, Conan the Barbarian sidekick, Aryan archaeologist, and a hot blonde Dr. Dolittle in the same film. You cannot deny the power of Bond.
At this stage we finally enjoy the meeting of Roger and Christopher. The director builds suspense by making us wait through almost half of the film to finally hear the magic that is the Christopher Walken cadence, which I can only describe as Shatneresque except cool. When you combine this rhythm with the dialogue of the typical Bond villain, it should become clear why this film is so dear to my heart.
In light of the late meeting, Roger accelerates their relationship by immediately tipping his hand regarding the assassination of Aubergine so that Christopher can start planning his murder right away. Roger follows that up by seducing May Day, which proves his bravery since he must have known there was only about a 1 in 3 chance that Roger would be the man in that encounter.
Sir Godfrey is sent to town to contact M, but only makes it as far as the carwash before being killed by May Day, Clemenza-style from the back seat. Roger on the other hand keeps his morning meeting with Christopher, who advises him "You need a stallion" which may not look good typed out, but trust me, the intonation is worth the cost of the rental alone. He then orchestrates an attempt to kill Roger first with a test ride of a horse named Inferno hopped up on steroids and possibly LSD on a steeplechase against extras from Ben Hur, and then by the more "old-school" method of clubbing him, putting him into a car, and pushing it into a lake.
After Roger escapes by breathing the air in the tires, he returns to HQ for recovery and we take a short break to establish the main plotline. Christopher is confronted by some Russian thugs and we learn that he is actually a rogue KGB agent. He tells off his former commanders and leaves in his company blimp for San Francisco with a consortium of European chipmakers. In exchange for somehow disposing of their competition in Silicon Valley, Christopher proposes to extort ludicrous licensing fees from them.
Roger is able to make up the two week headstart he gave Christopher by taking an airplane. He investigates Christopher's business in the San Francisco Bay, starting with an oil rig along the Hayward Fault. The rig has been retrofitted to pump large amounts of water into the well, which only confuses Roger until he happens upon Stacey Sutton from the first act at city hall. Always the gentleman, he stalks her back to her house in the countryside and breaks in. She is initially offended and gestures menacingly at him with a shotgun, but goons from Christopher's company interrupt the moment. Roger earns her trust by killing or maiming most of them, and she reveals her role in the picture. Part owner of the oil rig, she has been fending off takeover bids from Christopher, including the five million. When Roger explains Christopher's new scheme, Stacey exclaims that it could unleash an earthquake.
And if Christopher is worthy of the Bond villain mantle, it will be an earthquake of absurd proportions. Roger and Stacey infiltrate Christopher's other major investment in the region: an abandoned mine on the San Andreas Fault. There they find that Christopher has apparently bought all of the C-4 in the Western Hemisphere and dumped it in a few strategic points along the fault. The explosions would cleave the rock separating the Hayward Fault from the San Andreas while releasing the contents of the reservoir directly overhead into both faults, thus triggering a simultaneous double earthquake that would submerge the entire Silicon Valley under a tidal wave. This is possible because of science. Thus, as long as no one connects the nuclear-weapon-scale explosions and the gaping holes in the ground to the earthquake, Christopher will be in the clear. Even if they do, no one's going to mess with a man who has access to a semi-infinite supply of C-4.
But just to make sure, after he sets the timer on the detonator, Christopher breaks for the exit, floods the mine with everyone still in it and laughs joyfully as he opens fire on the workers as they try and run to safety. After sunning in the brilliant evil of his plan, he makes his way to the escape blimp. Meanwhile, on the other side of the mine, Roger and Stacey have been spotted by May Day. The two find a vent shaft and Roger, proving that chivalry is not dead, barrels ahead of Stacey. She gets snagged by May Day, at which point Roger valiantly comes back for her. In the process of freeing her, he and May Day fall into the half-flooded mine at which point May Day realizes she has been abandoned to die.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but it cannot even conceive of fury like Grace Jones scorned. May Day and Roger join forces to stop the explosion. Because the system cannot be defused, they have to remove the detonator from the mine. Together they hoist the detonator onto a rail car, but May Day has to ride on the car to keep the hand brake from catching. Once she is safely outside the mine, she remains on the rail car because she is a giant nut job.
Ordinarily Roger would stroll over to the nearest phone and call in the Air Force, or really even the RAF, to chase down Christopher and his getaway blimp. Sadly, while Stacey is wandering above ground, she manages to get abducted by Christopher, making her the first person in movie history to be snuck up on by a blimp. This forces Roger to follow them by grabbing onto the mooring rope. Christopher decides against drowning him in the Pacific, and instead crashes him and the blimp into one of the towers on the Golden Gate Bridge for a dramatic fight atop the main cable. Christopher initially has the advantage since he has a small fireman's axe and Roger only has his dry English wit, but it ends with Christopher falling from the top of the bridge. He dies as he lived: laughing maniacally. Roger for his troubles gets a commendation, a short vacation, and a chance to sleep with Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
I would have to say that this is the greatest movie I have ever seen.
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