ROBERT COTTON Max is a rewrite of Largo from NSNA. Once again, madness is not an excuse. Motivation? None. The most desperate attempt at backstory in history as an evil Nazi doctor with a cartoon pack of dynamite becomes central to the villain's character development. A waste. Notice I'm not even mentioning MayDay, the first graduate of the OddJob school of henching, coed branch. BILL KOENIG Christopher Walken is a treasure for film goers. Too bad Max Zorin isn´t worth of the actor. There´s just not much there, though Walken does an incredibly professional job of doing the most with little material. Grace Jones as May Day? Well, I give her credit for a surprisingly sympathetic demise but a better actress would have gotten a lot more out of it. JAMES McMAHON Max Zorin - Christopher Walken is utterly wasted in this confusingly written character.  There's some talk about his having been the product of superior genetic engineering, but we don't see a sign of it anywhere.  There's nothing here to inspire Walken to the kind of charisma he can project.  What should have been a no-brainer turns into what-a-waste, instead. DEBORAH LIPP Sigh. The plot is a retread of Goldfinger. Walken, a great actor, is all over the map; maybe this is a good performance by someone else's standards, but from him, it's patheti The writing is clichéd. Geez Pete, Nazi albino experimental insanity? It's like someone tore up a good script and it came down as confetti. May Day would have been great as a henchman. Really great; she is deadly, frightening, very weird, and flamboyant in a very Fleming way (had Fleming lived to see 80s fashions). But in a Moore-era Bond movie, it's simply not okay to have a woman figure into the plot unless Bond sleeps with her, and this was a big mistake. It's just so typical of the excesses of Moore's cinematic randiness. Brosnan didn't sleep with Xenia. Connery didn't sleep with Rosa Klebb or Mademoiselle LaPorte, Lazenby didn't sleep with Irma Bunt. But Moore has to nail every woman who crosses his path (and don't tell me about Bibi Dahl-that was a girl, not a woman). Which leads to some awkward scenes, none more so than the nightmarish sexual encounter between May Day and 007. Oh, man, it gives me the shudders!

ED WERNER Plain and simple, I loath this movie. Roger Moore is so past his prime that Zorin looks like he could be Bond's son! The entire screenplay is ill conceived, the dialogue is a disaster and the acting is horrendous. Christopher Walken could act earlier in his career, I know he could, I've seen him do it! Why then, are we subjected to this? Obviously, he dumbed down to the level of the entire movie. Sometimes I think that the Bond producers have relied too much on ripping major plot devices from the headlines. Do they really think if we are bombarded with this information from the media, that we want to rehash it all again in a movie that we go to for some escapism? Sometimes too topical is not a good thing and they would do well to remember this. AVTAK is primarily concerned with the flooding of Silicon Valley so that Zorin will then have a monopoly on the world's microchip market. I didn't care about it then and I don't care about it now. Sure, a bunch of people may be killed in the process, but I don't think that this is something to wrap a Bond movie around. TOM ZIELINSKI One of the absolute best actors of our time, Christopher Walken, signs on to play the villain in a Bond film.  Delicious!  But just as Christopher Lee was wasted as Scaramanga, Walken is wasted as Zorin, perhaps even more so.  It's a crime, really.  A stupid plot (flooding Silicon Valley) is, believe it or not, a (bad) rehash of Goldfinger. Machine-gunning underlings doesn't a great James Bond villain make.  Perhaps the worst villain in easily the worst film in the series. PAUL BAACK Max Zorin is a lame villain in a lame Bond flick. Not even Christopher Walken's considerable talents can create life in this cardboard cutout of a Bond villain. He's supposed to be the result of some Nazi genetic experimentation 40 years previous -- nothing like bringing the Nazis back as bad guys in the 1980s! -- but it's something that's only mentioned a couple of times, and has no bearing on the film's plot anyway. And as regards the plot, even in the 1980s IC chips were pretty much a commodity item; there wouldn't be much to gained by cornering the market on them. And I'm pretty sure the "Silicon Valley" wasn't where they were being made, anyway. Oh, well. By the end of the film, Zorin finally gets to do something actually villainous, and slaughters the men working for him by mowing them down with a machine gun. While laughing. You know, basic Christopher Walken stuff. May Day, played by Grace Jones, is a little more interesting. Not much more, mind you, but a little more. And that's mostly due to the physicality of Ms. Jones energetic performance and her fascinating, (then-)exotic looks. Technically, because she helps 007 save the day (earlier, he had schtooped her with his legendary "magic dick," thereby turning her to the side of the angels, etc.) she probably should be listed as a femme fatale rather than a henchman. But AVTAK needs something in the way of villainry, so May Day will have to do. Thanks, Grace!

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