What red-blooded, fun-loving, popcorn-munching movie loyalist wouldn’t want Quantum of Solace to be good?
After all, it reunites us with Daniel Craig’s bracing James Bond, this time (Bond’s 22nd on screen) with the great French actor Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) as his evil opponent. Sounds promising, right?
And how about that poster—with Bond just dashing and impeccably dressed enough to class up that ludicrously gangsta-lethal machine gun? It seemed so, well, promising, that some Britons even tried to ban it. Now that’s anticipation.
If nothing else, Quantum of Solace has that mouthful of a title. It’s less important that the title derives from Fleming’s fiction, as the movie itself generally doesn’t.
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What’s in a name? Daniel Craig tries to keep the James Bond legacy afloat in Quantum of Solace. |
Which is to say, unfortunately, that it feels like a misfire.
It’s hard to admit. But there were clues even during the anticipation. Like the signature song, that Jack White-Alicia Keys duet, getting diluted through overexposure in movie theater Coke commercials. Or our buried mixed feelings about the fact that we now live in a Jason Bourne world. For red-blooded, fun-loving, popcorn-munching movie loyalists, that fact is a very good thing, but what of poor James Bond?
Quantum of Solace is quite specifically a sequel to 2006’s Bond reboot, Casino Royale, which means keeping up with this movie’s plot (inasmuch as it’s even possible, or necessary) will require remembering what went on in that one. What matters most is that Bond’s self-assigned mission here is to avenge Vesper Lynd, the one true love among his many many many lovers (who betrayed him, but, you know).
Craig’s pretty clear on that. Yet for all its ministrations, about Amalric’s Euro-villain destabilizing the Bolivian government (and getting in bed with the CIA) so he can hoard natural resources, the script, by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, just doesn’t seem to have his back. Nor does it offer enough material of substance to Craig’s best supporting players—Judi Dench as Bond’s boss, Jeffrey Wright as a watchful, cautiously helpful CIA man, and of course Amalric, doing his best, with beady eyes and uncorrected teeth, to make his bad guy register.
The real problems most likely have to do with the direction. That’s from Marc Forster, currently well established as a maker of art-house fare that tends toward the slushy (Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction, The Kite Runner).
But perhaps Forster is simply out of his element here. He doesn’t skimp on the action-intensive set-pieces, but doesn’t stage them very coherently or compellingly. As a result, Quantum of Solace is so constantly climactic that it’s rather anti-climactic. From the cliffside car chase to the rooftop parkour parade to the tough guys in tensely brutal, to-the-death, hand-to-hand combat, it’s all a little too hard to follow or to want to—just as it’s hard not to think that maybe James Bond helped invent this sort of stuff, but now Jason Bourne owns it.
Quantum of Solace is a mean little movie, grim and single-minded, without the pleasure or mischief that has made Bond so endearing or contemptible, depending on whom you ask. The closest it comes to that old frisky spirit is when Craig’s Bond Girl du jour (Olga Kurylenko), quite literally an accessory here, tells him, “There is something horribly efficient about you.” To which, meaning it, he replies, “What a compliment.”
That’s the spirit, old boy. We’ll be waiting for No. 23.
