With Casino Royale, we’re supposed to have moved on from the campy-and-stupid Bond that describes the Pierce Brosnan entries. Gone were the gadgets, the silly names—Vesper Lynd being a notable exception—and the constant one-liners. It was a new beginning: a darker and heavier turn but more faithful to Ian Fleming’s original vision of Bond. So why are we back to that frivolous Bond again after only one movie?
Quantum of Solace picks up literally minutes after Casino Royale’s ending, jumping right into a high speed car chase as James Bond (Daniel Craig) races to deliver Mr. White to an MI-6 interrogation with M (Judi Dench). They learn of an organization Mr. White and Le Chiffre from the previous film belong to, called Quantum, a SPECTRE-like outfit with ties everywhere. Including MI-6, they learn, when M’s personal bodyguard of 8 years suddenly tries to kill her. Believing that this group is responsible for his one love Vesper’s death, Bond goes on an investigation that leads him to faux-philanthropist Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), owner of eco-friendly company Greene Planet, and also member of Quantum. Along the way, 007 recruits help from old friends René Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini) and CIA operative Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), as well as new Bond girls Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko) and Agent Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton). The latter’s name, thankfully, was never announced out loud.
At 106 minutes—38 minutes less than Casino Royale—Quantum of Solace is the shortest Bond movie ever, yet it’s packed to the brim with long action set pieces, which should tell you how incredibly slight the story is and how badly they’ve dropped the ball in developing Bond’s psychology further, something they’ve started off so well in Casino Royale by making Daniel Craig’s portrayal of the character a broken one. Here, instead of the angry orphan holding onto his humanity by a thread, Bond comes across as a spoiled brat; recklessly killing leads and throwing a hissy fit when he’s not staying at five star hotel suites. Yes, Bond is not supposed to be as hardcore as Jason Bourne; he’s the British gentleman with as much poise as he does body count, but here he just appears stupid, jumping into things without thought. Surely there’s more to being a Double-O agent than physical prowess? The quips don’t help, either.
The villain, Dominic Greene, is not only one of the weakest Bond villains in terms of villainy, but he’s undoubtedly the most forgettable one. Doesn’t matter that he has the coveted name pun. They roped a superb actor like Mathieu Amalric, then they gave him a one-note bourgeois villain with no distinct features, whose presence is so underwhelming that it feels like he’s barely in the movie at all. Brilliant. His one vivid act of villainy is stealing a gimmick from Goldfinger, gruesomely substituting gold with oil—the oil angle coming from the movie’s superficial attempt to update Bond into the “real” world, with its casual mention of Iraq and the oil power play between the British, the Americans and third world dictators. It worked in Casino Royale’s gritty and grounded tone, but in Quantum of Solace—with its futuristic toys, secret headquarters and world domination ploy—it’s just laughable and pathetic.
Marc Foster’s direction doesn’t have the suspenseful touch Martin Campbell did that made even a game of Baccarat as compelling as a gunfight, but instead favors a humanistic eye. In the Siena sequence, Foster repeatedly cuts back to an inconsequential pedestrian who was accidentally shot during Bond’s pursuit. Later, he lingers on a sad woman whose fruit basket is destroyed by the chase. Other times, Foster even shows poor peasants suffering as a result of Greene’s villainous plot. It’s a nice/different mood for a Bond film, but the script doesn’t support this yearning for depth, since it throws chase after chase after chase (and not even particularly good ones) at the story, rarely sparing any time for Bond’s much-needed character development, let alone social consciousness.
It’s just too brisk, too simple, too rushed, too lacking of a purpose. This is supposed to be a revenge-driven chapter, but it’s missing the personal side that would flesh out Bond’s motivation, reducing it to “Bond drinks a lot when he starts to think about Vesper.” It’s just a shopping list of exotic locations for Bond to visit and then blow up, which is not unusual for a James Bond film per se, but betrays the more nuanced approach to this character that Casino Royale initiated.
The one good thing that comes from the film is that it sets up the big bad organization Quantum for Bond to go after in the next movie.
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