Warning: Contains major spoilers!

Casino Royale was arguably the greatest Ian Fleming James Bond film since 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It had a good solid story based on Fleming’s 1953 novel with a clear narrative structure and a cohesive plot, interesting characters, a listenable music score, the right amount of action, and heart; and an impressively commanding central performance from its new Bond, Daniel Craig. Mostly all these elements are sadly missing from Quantum of Solace, making this 22nd Bond film barren of entertainment and sterile as the desert in which its climax (of sorts) takes place. In the Bourne films trilogy Jason Bourne is a seemingly soulless killer without identity, and in this latest 007 adventure James Bond has become his physically invulnerable ‘twin’.

I get no joy from writing such a negative review of a creative work in a series of films I have come to love as I would a treasured family member, but it has to be said that the twenty second Bond film, Quantum of Solace is a major disappointment after the excellence of its prequel. On a technical level Quantum is mostly a tour de force, but as an engaging piece of cinema entertainment I’m afraid it falls considerably short of the benchmark set by 2006’s Casino Royale.

The main problem with Quantum of Solace is that it’s a muddled mess of a picture from beginning to end. Anyone not seeing the preceding film in the series, Casino Royale, will have no chance of understanding what’s going on during the film’s 106 minutes running time, and many of those who have may be just as perplexed. It also doesn’t help that a worrying percentage of the dialogue is unintelligible, and is sprinkled with too many sub-titles. The editing is very fast, too fast, with the camera so close, too close, in to the action that it’s difficult, it’s difficult, to take in what you’re seeing, what you’re seeing being done, being done, to whom by whoever, and eventually couldn’t care less; as difficult to watch as that was to read! Whether the sound problem was down to the film’s sound mix or just the way it was shown at the preview screening at the ODEON Leicester Square I would be interested to learn.

The film opens with a VERY LOUD nerve-shredding car chase that is so bone-crunchingly realised it’s actually like being in a car crash! This opening chase has a dénouement that immediately connects Quantum to Casino Royale when Bond opens the boot of his battle scarred Aston Martin to reveal he’s been carrying a passenger, the painfully wounded Mr White (Jesper Christensen), who 007 shot at his Bond, James Bond moment at the ending of Casino Royale – segue into the lacklustre and instantly forgettable credit titles produced by MK12. Daniel Kleinman’s contribution to the Bond films since 1995 should never be underestimated, and here his design eye is sorely missed in spades. Jack White’s distorted guitar and Alicia Key’s painful wailing over the credit titles does nothing to ease an audience into the feeling they are about to experience a ‘Bond film’. I suspect that Bond filmmakers EON Productions could do little but grit their teeth collectively and smile when they had this title track hoisted upon them by some wunderkind at SONY. ‘Another Way To Die’ sounds more like a bad demo for a Bond title song, but one that has ticked all the boxes for the studios’ marketing demographics.

Mr White’s interrogation by M (Judi Dench) and Bond in Sienna soon turns into a murderous moment [we later learn it has enabled White to escape, though how he achieves this is a complete mystery!] and is followed by a breathtaking, but highly unbelievable, rooftop chase where Daniel Craig seemingly has more in common with Spiderman than James Bond. The resulting 40-foot fall taken by Bond and the MI6 double-agent he’s pursuing would have killed any real men stone dead! And having Bond’s pursuit of the man intercut with the viscerally charged Italian Palio horse race fails to do justice to either chase.

After some hi-tech jiggery pokery on a ‘Smart Wall’ in M’s office, by way of the Spielberg/Cruise sci-fi epic Minority Report, Bond travels to Haiti where an unusually large amount of the late Le Chiffre’s marked currency has been changing hands, and where Bond soon bloodily eliminates a hitman (who uncannily resembles 007) in a fight sequence that could have been ‘lifted’ straight from either of the last two Bourne movies. While 2nd Unit Director Dan Bradley is obviously a man at the top of his game, as he was Stunt Co-ordinator on The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Spiderman 2 and 3, it’s hardly surprising that the action in Quantum is so ‘Bourne like’ and Daniel Craig’s acrobatics seem more akin to a superhero rather than the flesh and blood man who we feel experiences pain in Casino Royale. The Bond films should always lead, never follow. Perhaps another style of action could have been investigated instead of just replicating a current action fad in filmmaking.

Exiting the hitman’s hotel with the killer’s steel briefcase in his hand, Bond is ordered to get into a car driven by an attractive young woman, Camille (Olga Kurylenko). Why? As they’ve never met before, who does she think he is? As they drive Bond notices in the rear mirror they are being followed by a black Haitian man on a motorbike. This whole sequence is confusing and fails to impart any relevance of what’s actually taking place, and isn’t helped at all by the dialogue:

Camille: (spotting the man following them) Friend of yours?
Bond: I don’t have any friends!
Camille: We didn’t settle on a price.
Bond: Make me an offer.
Camille: Okay, we’ll work it out later, over drinks (suggesting more). Dominic didn’t give you any trouble did he?
Bond: No! (Bond opens the hitman’s case on his lap and hands her what appears to be some kind of report, but all the pages inside are blank.)
Camille: What the hell is this?
Bond: (looking in the case) I think someone wants to kill you.

The case open on his lap reveals a handgun and a photograph identifying Camille as the hitman’s target. She pulls a gun on Bond but quick as a flash he grabs her wrist as the gun goes off harmlessly out of the open car window. Bond exits the car in a hurry and then ‘relieves’ the man who’s been shadowing them of his motorbike in two quick clean moves – probably his coolest move in the whole picture! We later understand (I think) that Camille, believing Bond to be the dead man, has collected him at the request of her lover, Dominic Green (Mathieu Amalric), who has hired the man to kill her (?) because of her duplicity in attempting to buy secret information from one of his best geologists. It appears that in a foolhardy double bluff Camille has returned to her ‘lover’ Greene even after knowing he has tried to have her killed, but still unaware of the actual identity of her passenger. However, Greene isn’t convinced by Camille’s bluff, and after showing her the dead geologist floating in the sea under the jetty on which they’re standing, he hands her over to his business associate and Bolivian dictator-in-waiting, the repellent General Medrano (Joaquín Cosio), who we later discover years earlier has killed her father and also raped and murdered her mother and sister, leaving Camille, a little child, to burn to death in the family home. Green suggests to Medrano in no uncertain terms he should kill Camille once he’s had his ‘fun’ with her and throw her body overboard. Meanwhile, Bond has been observing this interaction from a distance on the motorbike outside the fenced area surrounding the jetty. Seeing the girl being taken away by Medrano and his heavily armed guards Bond races into action on the motorbike and into the film’s boat chase. Why Bond should have set out to rescue Camille after spending less than three minutes with her in her car, and being shot at by her, is anyone’s guess, but hey – he’s the hero, heroes do that sort of crazy thing, and besides, Ian Fleming’s Bond was always partial to a bird with its wing down! But it makes little real sense. Camille is knocked unconscious during the frenetic boat chase and landing on the far jetty Bond dumps her in the arms of a startled boat boy, quipping, “She's sea sick!”

The action next moves to Bregenz, Austria, where a production of Puccini’s opera ‘Tosca’ is taking place on the world famous floating stage on Lake Constance. The opera performance is in modern dress, and back stage Bond conveniently finds a Tom Ford tuxedo to fit his measurements, leaving a muscular opera performer wondering how he’s going to appear on stage wearing only his underpants! Blending in and mingling with the many upmarket guests arriving for the opera Bond notices that certain ‘special’ guests on a checklist are being given a different goodie bag the receptionist produces from under a table. Following one of these ‘special’ guests into the gent’s restroom Bond ‘relieves’ him of the bag, which on inspection contains an earpiece receiver and microphone. Now wearing the earpiece, Bond secretes himself in the scaffolding high up in the set on the floating stage where he spies on Dominic Greene and the audience far below. It soon becomes clear via his earpiece that Greene is using the event to camouflage a ‘board meeting’ of members of Quantum, the mysterious organisation in which we assume Greene is a high-ranking member. After listening-in to Greene’s conversation with the secret assembly, Bond interrupts with: “Can I offer an opinion. I really think you people should find a better place to meet!” and creates exactly the response he wants as some of the Quantum members panic and immediately leave their seats, enabling him to quickly snatch shots of them on his SONY mobile phone and patch them through to M for identification. Only the cool-as-a-cucumber Mr White stays seated in the audience and remains undetected by Bond. With their plan to hide in plain sight backfiring and their anonymity compromised, Greene orders everyone to disperse and remove any evidence of them being there. On the way out of the opera house Greene and his henchmen run into Bond on one of the landings. Outnumbered, Bond attempts to make a fast exit, only to end up in a running gun battle that spills over into the opera house restaurant full of diners in evening dress [why aren’t they watching the opera?]. This could have been an exceptionally thrilling and nail-biting sequence, but in the hands of director Marc Forster I’m afraid it becomes something more at home in an art house movie as Bond’s gun battle with Greene’s goons in slow-motion is intercut simultaneously with the mock violence of guns being fired and actors falling dead in the performance of ‘Tosca’, bringing to mind the far superior climax of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Part III. And as Bond leaves the opera house he takes out another attacker who he believes to be one of Greene’s men in the same style as Roger Moore’s 007 did to Stromberg’s henchman Sandor in The Spy Who Loved Me. Quantum of Solace is curiously littered with in-jokes to past Bond films that can’t possibly mean anything to a casual audience member and are mostly distracting to those whom it does! It’s an idea that should have died with Die Another Day.

Finding his credit cards have been cancelled by M, Bond visits the only person he believes he can trust – Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini). Why? After believing that Mathis was on Le Chiffre’s payroll and having him viciously interrogated and tortured at the end of Casino Royale, how did MI6 and Bond discover and prove to themselves he was completely innocent? A throwaway line that he’s been given his villa in Italy as compensation for the security services mistake hardly explains why Mathis is Bond’s new best friend! Inexplicably, Bond wants Mathis to accompany him to Bolivia, where Greene’s master plan is to take effect. Why? Only after he asks him does Mathis explain to Bond that he had spent seven years in the country, or did Bond already have that information? It’s a very contrived way of getting the character of Mathis to Bolivia. Why would Mathis want to go anywhere with Bond after his experience at the hands of MI6?

On the flight to Bolivia, Bond is seen to quaff more martinis than we would usually see him drink in several films, making him appear a lesser character, something he should never be. When Bond and Mathis arrive at the airport in Bolivia they are met by Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton), looking for all the world as though she’s been dispatched from a ‘Strippergram’ agency [was she wearing anything under that raincoat?], and who has been sent by M to scold 007 on her behalf and see that he returns to London on the next available flight. The idea that anyone, let alone M, would send someone who is little more than an office girl to frogmarch MI6’s deadliest secret agent back to the UK is ludicrous in the extreme, and Gemma Arterton’s amateurish performance as Fields convinces about as much as model Tania Mallet’s did in Goldfinger! The ‘joke’ relating to her full name will be totally lost on the majority of the cinemagoers seeing the film, because as her Christian name (Strawberry) is only listed in the film’s end credits, most of the audience will be leaving their seats before the credits even roll, much like many of the audience at the FDA (Film Distributor’s Association) Multimedia screening I attended. At this point I was only just able to see the gun barrel sequence, disappointingly used at the end of the film, through a sea of shuffling silhouettes, the very opposite of what happened at the end of the media screening for Casino Royale.

When Agent Fields takes Bond and Mathis to stay at a seedy Bolivian hotel under their cover as teachers on a sabbatical, Bond baulks at the potentially cockroach infested joint, “I’d rather stay in a morgue!” he exclaims and takes them all to the best hotel in town, allowing Bond the funniest one-liner in the whole picture as he announces to the reception staff: “We’re teachers on a sabbatical – who won the Lottery!” Very funny, but more Roger Moore than Daniel Craig, and out of step with the rest of the film.

Together with Agent Fields and Mathis, Bond attends a fundraising party organised by Quantum, where Dominic Greene gives a speech to his guests that is very reminiscent of Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens) address to an assembly about the Icarus Project in Die Another Day. Bond discovers a supposedly drunk Camille has embarrassed Greene in front of a potential cash donor by blurting out information about some of his past double dealing, losing him a vast amount of sponsorship money in the process and placing herself in immediate danger from the diminutive eco-maniac. Greene’s parting line about Bond and Camille being ‘damaged goods’ is among the better dialogue in the film. Bond takes Camille from under Greene’s nose and immediately exits the party with her, leaving Mathis and Fields behind. As Greene’s henchman Elvis (Anatole Taubman) is sent after the couple, Fields trips him and he tumbles painfully down a long stone staircase, his toupeé dislodging at the end of his fall, the first time we realise he is wearing a hairpiece. Is this supposed to mean something or just be humorous? During their drive away from the party, Bond and Camille are stopped by two motorcycle policemen who ask to see their papers. Bond complies but the policemen are still not satisfied and order him to open the trunk of his vehicle, which Bond does, to discover Mathis, who has been severely beaten into a state of semi-consciousness (presumably) by Greene’s thugs. With Bond’s hands full as he lifts Mathis to his feet from the trunk, the policemen draw their guns on Bond and open fire, hitting Bond’s human shield Mathis in the back but missing Bond who kills them both, and 007 makes doubly sure with the second officer by firing another round into the man’s prostrate body. Mathis dies cradled in Bond’s arms. Bond then carries his friend’s body to a nearby rubbish skip where he dumps him. Camille is shocked by Bond’s seemingly callous act and asks. “Is this how you treat your friends?” to which Bond can only reply, “He wouldn’t have minded.” If there had been more back story between the two men in Casino Royale which could have been elaborated upon in further detail in Quantum, this ‘death of Kerim Bey-style’ sequence could have been emotionally very affecting, instead it’s just kind of thrown away, much like Mathis’ body.

Returning to the hotel with Camille, where he’s been staying with Fields and Mathis, Bond discovers his ‘wife’ has left a message for him at the front desk. All it says is, “Run.” Considering her fate, when exactly would she have found time to leave this message? Alarmed by Field’s message Bond asks Camille to stay in the lobby while he checks upstairs. Discovering the door to his room open he enters to find M, accompanied by a number of armed burly MI6 security officers. Believing he is on a violent revenge fuelled rampage and responsible for the deaths of not only the two Bolivian policemen but also Mathis, M demands 007 hand over his weapon and revokes his licence to kill, but not before she reveals to him the naked dead body of Fields on his hotel bed. The girl has been drowned in crude oil and is covered from head to toe in the black gold.

Filmed in homage to the gilding of Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) in 1964’s Goldfinger, this scene loses any dramatic or shock impact for three reasons: 1) photographer Greg Williams’ photographs of this scene were officially released to The Daily Mail weeks before the film was previewed, rapidly travelling around the world on the Internet for anyone to see; 2) the angle of the establishing shot used when Bond [and the audience] first sees Shirley Eaton lying dead on the bed in Goldfinger is used at the end of the scene in Quantum and not at the beginning where it would have established exactly what we were looking at. Instead it’s confusing for anyone that doesn’t already know Field’s fate as to what Bond and M are looking down at on the bed. 3) the music in this scene fails to enhance or dramatise the scene in any way, illustrating how important John Barry’s music was to the success of the series and how inadequate the current composer’s work is in comparison. Also, the decision to release photographs of this key dramatic scene prior to the worldwide release of the film is unfathomable. In 1964 nothing prepared me as a 13-year-old schoolboy for the sight of Shirley Eaton’s near naked body (but for the corner of a cushion in the foreground covering her bum!) covered in gold paint in Bond’s hotel bedroom. The shock affect combined with John Barry’s metallic percussive music made it an incredibly powerful and atmospheric scene that has lingered in the memories of a whole generation of schoolboys for ever. Turning to the practical side of murdering young women by coating their bodies with toxic substances; I can just about accept Oddjob merrily going about his work with a large pot of gold paint and a four-inch Harris paint brush whistling ‘Whistle While You Work’, but to believe that someone could carry a naked girl covered head-to-toe in crude oil into a hotel bedroom without leaving any sign of the oil anywhere else in the room, or in fact even being able to carry anyone that slippery dead or alive anywhere, is stretching credibility to breaking point! Try it with your girlfriend and a bottle of baby oil sometime. I guarantee you you will never lift her off the floor, even if you try all night. But it will be fun trying!

Having no interest in Camille, M orders her men to let her go. Then orders her armed guards to escort Bond from the hotel and back to the UK under close arrest. Bond waits until he enters the elevator with the four guards before he explodes into action knocking all of them out cold. Making his way back through the hotel by running on the outside ledge of the interior balcony, leaping over the banister he bumps into M on the way out and quickly explains to her he didn’t kill Mathis. Outside the hotel, Camille, in a beaten up VW Beetle, shouts for Bond to get into her car. M orders her men to stand down and let Bond follow his lead. During a stop-off Bond steals a new more powerful car and he and Camille drive to an airstrip where Bond exchanges the vehicle with an old man for an ancient twin-propped transport plane he pilots to get him closer to Greene’s base located in the Bolivian desert. No sooner than Bond and Camille are in the air than the old man is on the phone, and you just know he’s not ordering a pizza!

While they’re flying over this wild and desolate region Bond looks down from the cockpit and asks Camille what the large fissure in the earth is, “A sinkhole…,” she explains. The cliché that follows is a by-the-book one-sided dogfight where Bond dodges a number of aircraft. One of the engines on Bond’s plane is hit and billows thick black smoke so that, surprise surprise, the pursuing jet aircraft is blinded and flies into a mountain – boom! Kind of like the Aston Martin chase in Goldfinger – only airborne! One down two to go? Bond realises he can’t outrun or outgun the remaining aeroplane and helicopter so he puts the transporter plane into a vertical climb as he throws Camille the only parachute on board. What happens next is as over the top as anything ever seen in a Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan Bond film. The couple jump out of the plane together but Bond loses his grip on Camille and then finds himself having to catch up to her in mid-air without a parachute. Sound familiar? It should do, it was done for real and much better in 1979’s Moonraker, but here I’m afraid it looks barely convincing and is marred by clumsy editing as their single parachute opens at the very last moment having them tumble into the sinkhole they’ve flown over earlier, landing with another impact that would have most likely killed any normal human beings stone dead! While in the sinkhole Bond and Camille discover the valuable resource that Greene is attempting to harness – fresh water. They also both discuss losing someone, which appears to be very similar to their dialogue exchange in the aircraft cockpit.

After leaving the sinkhole and walking through the desert, Bond and Camille eventually ready themselves for their assault on Greene’s base, a hotel-like complex in the desert, and where we discover that Camille is a rogue Bolivian agent with no kills. Somewhere in all this subterfuge, double-cross and double-dealing is the lugubrious Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), who makes a couple of appearances for little reason other than to show us that the CIA are often ‘in bed’ with bad people and have to work and drink in crummy Third-World dives. Quelle surprise! Once, the casting of an African-American in the role of Fleming’s Caucasian-written character Felix Leiter would have caused raised eyebrows, as the literary copyright holders opined at the news in 1983 of African-American actor Bernie Casey being cast as the character in Never Say Never Again. Thankfully in 2008 no one gives a hoot!

Breaking into the complex, Camille goes after General Medrano to avenge her family while Bond seeks out Greene in a double fought climax similar to the Bond vs. Graves/Jinx vs. Frost fights at the end of Die Another Day. By the time Bond and Camille find themselves trapped in a blazing room in the complex ready to shoot themselves rather than burn to death, I too had lost the will to live. When you sit watching a new Bond film and have come to a scene which is supposed to be tense and involving and all you can think is, ‘Hurry up and shoot her and then yourself so I can go and eat!’ you know you’re either watching a very bad film or you’ve been watching James Bond films far too many years, or in this case, both! The manner of Greene’s death (unseen in the film) also makes little sense, other than to make an ironic abstract point of revenge in relation to Agent Field’s death.

Although the ending resolves why Vesper had allowed herself to be blackmailed in Casino Royale, James Bond’s and the filmmaker’s response to this is frustratingly ambiguous.

Daniel Craig (or Creg as the American TV networks insist on calling him) is once again a commanding figure but given little chance to shine with the material on view here. Had he at the end of the picture looked into the camera and uttered the line, “I’ll be back!” it would have come as no surprise after watching his Terminator-like performance as little more than a cold killing machine. The smart dialogue and interplay between characters that was such an attractive feature of Casino Royale is barely on display here. Screenwriters Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade having made such a perfect job of Craig’s first 007 outing have seriously lost the plot here! We can only guess how deadlines and various re-writes during production may have affected their original intentions.

Mathieu Amalric’s Dominic Greene is a nasty piece of work, but barely a worthy foil for Bond. All of Greene’s henchmen combined register zero on the sinister scale, and the film sorely needs a villain with the screen charisma of the wonderful Mads Mikkelsen, whose Le Chiffre was one of the best played villains in the entire series. Olga Kurylenko’s damaged Camille is thinly drawn in the script and she makes the most of the material at hand while looking impossibly beautiful at any angle the camera catches her.

It would appear that the filmmaker’s vision on this project was blinded by inconsolable darkness. The obsession that cinema has in the 21st century with darker more psychological heroes may work for Batman and other fantasy-style figures, but for Bond, on this occasion, it’s a dark too far. With the budget for Quantum reportedly around £130 ($260) million it’s hard to see where it went. And the locations, while interesting, fail to add the necessary glamour required in a Bond film.

Matt Chesse’s and Richard Pearson’s quick cut breakneck speed editing does little in affording the viewer any time to visually grasp much of what’s happening in the action scenes, however, with barely five weeks in which to edit a picture of this size and complexity, overseen by Marc Forster, it must have been a tall order to complete it to everyone’s complete satisfaction. Only an extras-packed DVD release will explain if much of the exposition currently missing from the picture was shot but left on the cutting room floor. In the final analysis the film looks mostly like it belongs to the second unit. Once again Gary Powell and his stunt team go for broke and put Daniel Craig very convincingly in the thick of the action, making Quantum the perfect showcase for their art, which has now developed into its own form of science.

David Arnold’s musical score for Quantum, if you can call it that, is once again little more than a cacophony of noise from the Die Another Day School of tub-thumping musak. More like a stampede of musical notes rather than purposely placed crotchets and quavers on a score sheet by a composer who actually knows how to compose a melody. And where was the integral sound of The James Bond Theme when we needed it? I’ve heard enough – next composer please!

Quantum plays like it’s the action heavy middle of a 3-hour-plus Bond picture, with Casino having been the opening third. Unfortunately the final climactic chapter of the picture will no doubt be left until BOND 23 in 2010 (?), when a world of loyal, but sorely tested Bond fans will discover who and what the villainous cartel Quantum is all about, if anyone cares by then. After the 10/10 perfection of Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace comes as a bitter 1/10 disappointment for this writer. On the whole I enjoyed the trailers much more!

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