Quantum of Solace, the second entry in the Daniel Craig-era of James Bond films, is a big, loud, shaky movie, filled with action you can’t see, dialogue you can’t hear, and acting you hope you won’t remember.
While the previous film, Casino Royale, felt like a breath of fresh air for a film series that had grown stale over 40 years and dozens of films, Solace makes us wonder if adding hard-edged realism to the Bond franchise is such a good idea.
Gone are many of the Bond cliches; no “Bond, James Bond,” no “shaken, not stirred.” This Bond is not the calm, cool, ultra-stylish super-spy of old. Instead, he’s a cold, bitter killer who seems more at home mercilessly slitting his enemies’ throats in a back alley than spending time schmoozing in a ballroom holding a martini.
Umm…wait…aren’t Bond films supposed to be fun?No, this film is much closer in spirit to another spy-action franchise.
Think Bourne. Jason Bourne. The action sequences in particular take a page (or several chapters) from the Bourne playbook, which means lots of impossible to follow quick cuts, lots of shaky, nausea-inducing hand camera work, and several helpings of noise.
As a result, whenever things get exciting, it is extremely difficult to follow. You can’t tell what’s going on, but you know it’s loud and fast, and you’ll have to wait until it’s over to find out what happened.
Also, it is difficult to make out some of the dialogue in the film, which is not helped by the fact that almost all the characters in the film are speaking with thick accents.
There is a scene where a character is trying to carry on a conversation on the phone, but his voice is being drowned out by a loud cab driver babbling on about nonsense. Much like the character, one wishes the movie would just pipe down a little once in a while.
Daniel Craig fits this new cold Bond universe perfectly, as his steely blue-eyed gaze conveys no warmth or empathy whatsoever. He also seems to have challenged himself to deliver as many of his lines as possible with a tightly clenched jaw.Much of the support acting is sub-par. Mathieu Amalric in particular is ridiculous as the main villian, a French environmentalist named Dominic Greene (har har) whose dastardly scheme seems to revolve around…robbing poor villages of water. Surely his madness has no bounds!
Olga Kurylenko is flat and inconsequential as the “Bond Girl,” Camille, a one-note joke of a character on a life-long quest for revenge.
In the end, I think Quantum of Solace fails because it forgets why we watch Bond films in the first place: escape. Bond is not supposed to be a gutty, realistic character.
He is supposed to be super-human and super-cool, not a moody, brooding sad-sack.
Here’s hoping that for the planned third movie, the filmmakers will inject a sorely missing element back into the franchise: fun.