Octopussy (1983)
Bonus moment: When Bond smashes a goon’s face into an aquarium and he’s choked to death by an octopus.
A View to a Kill (1985)
You wouldn’t think that a scene with a blimp, which are the goofiest of air traveling options, would be rittled with tension, but the closing scene to this film is indeed a tense blimp scene. Bond is going after this film’s big bad Max Zorin (played by none other than Christopher Walken) and he hangs onto a rope dangling from Zorin’s blimp. He gets a little air tour of San Francisco before the blimp makes it to the Golden Gate Bridge. Assuming they can knock Bond off they get as close as possible, but Bond simply ties the rope connected to the blimp to the bridge. While this seems really outlandish at the time, the ensuing struggle is great.
I think one of the main aspects of Bond that people really enjoy, like Indiana Jones and John McClane, is that he’s a normal guy. He doesn’t have superpowers. Though sometimes his antics go beyond the border of reality, at his core he’s still just a man. The few times that Bond almost slips from his balance atop the bridge leave you with a jolt as you think ‘Bond can’t fall!’ and he doesn’t. When he regains his balance, he gets into a fight with Christopher Walken who happens to be carrying an ax. Bond overcomes eventually and sends Zorin falling to his death in the water below, one of the better onscreen deaths in the franchise history.
The Living Daylights (1987)
The killer steals a truck that Bond leaps onto the roof of and they begin to race through the town. This is our first introduction to Timothy Dalton as Bond and he starts it out with a kick to the teeth (if we’re sticking with fight scene parlance). What I really like about this scene is when Bond cuts through the tarp and enters the cabin of the stolen truck. He causes the driver to crash through a barrier and over a cliff. Bond then ejects his parachute and is pulled form the truck just before the flaming ammunition boxes in the rear cause it to explode. Then in true Bond fashion he lands on a single woman’s boat.
