Quantum of Solace

If you like fast cars, hard core fight scenes and The Bourne Identity, then this is definitely the flick for you. The fast camera angles and car chases almost made me forget I was supposed to be watching a Bond movie.

Now, I’m all for paper thin plots beefed up by bloody fight scenes, but not under the title Bond. With Bond, I expect debonair, class and an easy manner only few men in the world can achieve. Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan, Timothy Dalton – men who can make a woman’s heart melt when they’re forty years her senior.

In his role as Bond, Daniel Craig is about as sexually appealing as a lamp.

He doesn’t even manage to bed the leading lady while playing a character known for sexual conquests. In Quantum of Solace, Bond has been stripped of his iconic status. He no longer represents anything particularly British, or even modern.

In place of glamour, we get a spurious grit; instead of style, we get product placement; in place of fantasy, we get a redundant and silly realism.

Quantum of Solace is the 22nd James Bond film. The direct sequel to the 2006 film Casino Royale, it is directed by Marc Forster, and features Daniel Craig's second performance as James Bond. In the film, Bond battles Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a member of the Quantum organisation posing as an environmentalist, who intends to stage a coup in Bolivia to take control of its water supply. Bond seeks revenge for the death of Vesper Lynd, and is assisted by Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko), who has her own vengeance issues. It was decided beforehand the film would be a direct sequel, to exploit Bond's emotions following Vesper's death in the previous film. Just as Casino Royale's theme was terrorism, the sequel focuses on environmentalism.

Or at least it tries.

Following Casino Royale was never going to be easy, but Marc Forster has brought the brand’s successful relaunch crashing back to earth — with a yawn. The screenplay is at times incomprehensible and the casting is a mess.

It weighs down on you, like a pound of fruit cake soaking wet.

Quantum of Solace is a Frankenstein monster. Stitched together from leftover parts. It talks. It moves in fits and starts but it has no mind of its own. Looking very expensive and desperate, Quantum has the air of a very long, very elaborate revue sketch.

I suppose it never occurred to the people signing the cheques to hire a director who had actually been a fan of the previous films. Despite Forster’s claiming that travelling the world had become less exotic in the years since the beginning of the franchise, it didn’t stop him shooting in 6 different countries.

He felt Bond was more humanised and wanted to focus on the character, yet the character isn’t explored at all! A superficial vengeance motivation. A deux es machina ending when Bond mysteriously grows as a man and mercifully spares the life of the man he’s been searching for. Forster couldn’t make the right call with a character if he had a phone book.

James Bond is not an action hero. He is an agent. A cool, calculating agent. Say it with me now – A-G-E-N-T.

The one woman Bond does manage to get down and dirty with is a fellow agent who sticks around just long enough for the audience to want to see more – then she is killed off. And how does Bond manage to get into her knickers?

In the only showing of true Bond motivation, Craig takes Agent Fields up to his room, wonders into the bedroom and calls out, ‘I can’t find any stationary. Help me look?’

I could eat alphabet soup and shit a better pickup line.

To be fair, it’s not Craig’s fault. The actor is only as good as the man who directs him. And the man who directed him turned 007 into Double-oh Valium. Boring and under done.

A Bond film where there is no chemistry between the leading actors is never going to work. Craig and Kurylenko interacted like understudies. Comfortable in their own role, but hopeless when it comes to other characters.

Forster made the unforgivable mistake of taking a Bond girl and focussing on what was between her ears instead of between her legs.

Kurylenko is not comfortable on screen. She’s a model, not an actress and it shows. She’s like Bambi with a gun. Cute and harmless. Her character’s motivation is interesting, but pointless in the overall scheme of things. Eventually she becomes a protégée to Bond, a younger sister. He teaches her how to kill. She teaches him to walk away from a blazing inferno and look really sexy doing it.

Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) is also a character that doesn’t ring true as a Bond villain. He had no fantastical villainous lair, no diabolical air. Amalric wanted to wear make-up for the role, but Forster explained that he wanted Greene not to look grotesque, but to symbolize the hidden evils in society. If the Bond films were meant to be symbolic, Octopussy wouldn’t even have happened.

Quantum of Solace was a masterpiece of failure. Perfectly respectable as an action film, but as a Bond film it reeked. Putting the name Bond on the title is like taking a respectable English gentleman and placing him in a trailer park.

Two and a half stars.