This movie opens with a great scene where a bunch of 00 agents pit themselves against the SAS in a mock raid of Gibraltr, which is defended by the SAS who are waiting on high alert and armed with paintball guns. Unfortunately a real enemy agent infiltrates the exercise and kills one of the 00 agents. Naturally, James Bond (played excellently by Timothy Dalton, in his first of two outings as James Bond) clocks on to this and goes after him, leaving the SAS quite confused. This set of scenes ends with James funnily landing on a boat occupied by a woman who’s on the phone saying she longs to find a ‘real man’.
This leads into the theme tune by A-ha, which is one of the best Bond theme tunes of all time.
The script unravels quite intruigingly and concisely from here on, as Bond manages to extract a defected Russian general from enemy soil, and in the course of this, non-lethally takes out an enemy sniper (played quite well by the beautiful Maryam d’Abo) after seeing she wasn’t really a trained sniper – something fishy’s going on and James intends to get to the bottom of it without shooting any seemingly innocent women in the process. Props to the writers, directors and editors, and of course actors – especially Dalton for carrying the vibe of the movie with his energy and seriousness, plus the odd dose of humour.
Good to see Miss Moneypenny is replaced by a younger woman at long last. This time she’s played by Caroline Bliss, who is in her mid 20s here. She does a fair job – nothing special but not terrible or inappropriate either. Up until this point, Moneypenny was played in all the Bond movies through the Connery and Moore eras by Lois Maxwell, who was alright when she debuted with Dr No in 1962 (in her mid 30s) – her chemistry with Bond was believable there – but when she’s still around in A View To A Kill in 1985 (in her late 50s) she seems long past her sell-by date, especially when she’s supposedly being romantic with James Bond. So it’s great to see her finally replaced – this was long overdue, I suggest.
This movie features one of the most iconic baddies in the entire Bond saga – the understated KGB agent called Necros (played very well by Andreas Wisniewski) who initially poses as a milkman after killing the real milkman, and manages to infiltrate an MI6 base to extract the defected general back to Russia. His role is continuous throughout this movie, as the main muscle on the baddies’ side. He’s a bit like John Wyman’s character Erich Kriegler, the young blonde KGB agent in For Your Eyes Only (1981), crossed with Ivan Drago from Rocky IV (played by Dolph Lundgren, who also appeared for a second in the previous Bond movie, A View To A Kill, which came out just a few months prior to Rocky IV, which itself premiered on Bruce Lee’s birthday, Nov 27, 1985).
40 minutes in, we become properly introduced to the lead female in this movie, called Kara Milovy, played quite well by half-Georgian actress Maryam d’Abo who is up there among the best Bond girls of all time. She had great chemistry with Dalton both on and off-screen. Although I’ve found no reports of them officially dating, they were occasionally pictured together in the late 80s and into the 90s. Anyway, back to the movie. So, James has a good chat with Kara to make sure she’s innocent, then helps her to shrug off her KGB tail. Shortly before this, we were also introduced to a nice Bond car – something completely missing from the last Bond movie (A View To A Kill, 1985). This time it’s an Aston Martin equipped with laser beams, missiles and bulletproof glass, as well as skis and tyre spikes for moving over snow & ice, plus a rocket-powered turbo booster. But the car eventually crashes and this leads into one of the most iconic Bond movie scenes of all time, where Timothy Dalton and Maryam d’Abo (as James Bond and Kara Milovy) slide down a snowy mountainside using an opened cello case as a twin bobsled and the cello itself as a steering rudder. They slide all the way down to the country’s border and beyond, where the militia that was shooting at them stops giving chase.
This movie gets a little slower and less exciting for around quarter an hour, towards the middle of the movie, as we learn a bit more about the baddies and their complex relationships and agendas, as well as what Bond’s strategy is. These scenes can get a bit boring for those who have seen this movie many times before, and this brings down my overall rating of this movie from what could have been Pretty Good, down to Decent which is still the highest rating I’ve given to any Bond movie – just one step better than the best Bond movies by Connery and Moore. After quarter an hour of less thrilling scenes in the middle of the movie, it soon sharpens up and becomes quite spicy when James’s colleague is killed and he regains vigour for his mission, then smells another rat and pretends to kill someone in the hopes that everyone will now show their cards.
The action heats up nicely again, around 40 minutes before the end, as James and Kara make their escape from a Russian airbase in Afghanistan, making friends with a powerful local Afghani resistance leader in the process after setting him free the day before his execution were due. The Afghani resistance leader was called Kamran Shah, and he was played quite well by Art Malik.
The ending is quite strong – it stays quite interesting and has a decent tempo. There’s good musical effects during the fight scenes towards the end too. Although it can still get a little tedious for people who have seen this movie many times before. The suspenseful scene with Bond and Necros hanging onto the ropes out the back of the plane while the bomb is counting down, near the end of this movie, drags on just a little too long for my liking, as someone who’s seen this movie many times before and remains thoroughly entertained by much of it. The entire fight scene on between Bond and Necros while the plane was in the air, only lasted a few minutes, but I would have liked it to be more concise and less prolongingly suspenseful still, personally. After that, when Bond dropped the bomb on the Russians crossing the bridge, to put an end to them chasing his new Mujahideen friends, that was a very nice touch. Props to the writers and the whole team for that level of clever detail. The plane losing fuel after that, and the escape plan in the jeep, was a nice twist too, keeping us on our toes, in a good way. After this, the very ending stays quite concise, with decent action and good humour.