Tom Cruise was around 60 when he shot the recent Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Though the movie functions as at least a temporary farewell to his signature action series, there’s no real question that if Cruise ultimately decides to play Ethan Hunt again, it will happen. Remarks about his advancing age have been primarily listened to expressing amazement that a man could strap himself to the wing of a biplane entering his seventh decade.
Sixtysomething in the 2020s looks very different than they did 40 years ago, when Roger Moore played James Bond for one last time in 1985’s A View to a Kill. Moore was 57 when he shot the movie, and notices at the time focused on his creakiness in the part. It was his seventh go-round in the role, which he played over the course of 12 years. He both is and isn’t the longest-running Bond of record; no one has played the character in more movies, but Daniel Craig held the part longer, with 15 years elapsing between Casino Royale and No Time to Die (which was shot when he just over 50). Sean Connery could use a technicality to trump them both; thanks to Never Say Never Again, a Thunderball remake produced by another studio, his time as Bond spanned 21 years, and made a Moore-tying seventh feature.
That leaves one unequivocal record for Moore, at least so far: No older has ever played Bond. (He was born three years before Connery, so even when they both had a Bond picture out in 1983, Moore was the older one.) This also makes him a pioneer in the field of elderly action heroes, which now are more or less their own subgenre – Liam Neeson was A View to a Kill age when he made Taken, and then he made another decade-plus worth of those types of movies – but were not particularly in vogue in 1985 beyond the existence of low-rent Charles Bronson movies.
But since roughly 1965 or so, Bond movies have been following trends, not setting them, and following its own formulas, not breaking them. This means that A View to a Kill isn’t particularly about Bond’s advancing years; that would make it seem off-model. (Indeed, Moore’s retirement from the role wasn’t announced until six months later, despite the film’s strong box office.) As such, his swan song is a peculiar yet compelling mix of Moore showing his age and the movie around him attempting to keep up with the times. Bond squares off against Zorin (Christopher Walken), a crazed businessman who plots to destroy Silicon Valley (!) so that he can maintain a monopoly over microchip production and seems more genuinely disturbed than the self-satisfied megalomaniacs of past films; Zorin’s henchwoman turned eventual Bond ally is played by the inimitably striking Grace Jones; the movie’s top-tier theme song is from Duran Duran.
Yet the entire movie is not as hip as those elements. Bond spends an inordinate amount of time sneaking around horse stables, while some other attempts at more modern elements clang: There’s a bunch of car-crash slapstick action that feels leftover from Blues Brothers-style comic spectacle, and the movie’s splashy opening manages to feel overfamiliar (as Bond’s second skiing sequence in three movies) and hilariously out of touch: When Bond breaks out a makeshift snowboard, the soundtrack pumps up the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” seemingly miscategorizing snowboarding as more akin to surfing than skateboarding. Then again, if Bond seemed out of step with the youth culture in 1985, maybe that was OK; his May ’85 box office rival that tripled the grosses of A View to a Kill was Rambo: First Blood Part II, in which Sylvester Stallone grimaces his way through endless rounds of machine-gun fire. In View, it’s Walken’s baddie who fires a machine gun indiscriminately, as Moore retains his unflappable semi-goofiness.
As such, Moore doesn’t look weak or out of shape so much as akin to a genial uncle, doing his best to keep up and still look pretty suave doing it. Less disconcerting than the action sequences – some of which, like a gritty escape from an elevator shaft engulfed in flames, are as good as ever – are the moments where he is called upon to bed women several decades his junior. (The main Bond girl this time around is Tanya Roberts, perhaps best known for, well, either this movie, or playing Donna’s mom Midge on That ’70s Show.) Age gaps are far from unprecedented in Hollywood, of course, but none of the movie’s pairings are exactly Bogart and Bacall, either.
The Daniel Craig series, with their tighter ongoing continuity, spent more time on the issue of how long Bond could realistically keep doing his job without burning out, getting killed, or alienating his colleagues. But as interesting as it was to see all of that addressed and explored, A View to a Kill is a more prototypical Bond finale, for better and for worse: The movie leaves off as if Moore might well be back in another two years’ time. When Bond did return, with Timothy Dalton taking over for The Living Daylights, the series maintained director John Glen, who wound up making all five ’80s Bond movies. Today, with no new Bond in sight and longer gaps between movies, it wouldn’t be a stretch to someday see an actor break Moore’s record and play Bond at 58, or even into his sixties. Maybe, as with Cruise, it wouldn’t even receive much comment in the movie itself or the press surrounding it. But it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get to experience a 57-year-old Bond snowboarding to the Beach Boys, hanging off a firetruck, or flirting with a now-middle-aged Miss Moneypenny with quite the same devil-may-care charm.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.