Quantum of Solace reviews

James Bond is back for the 22nd time. The story carries on where Casino Royale left off. Bond (Daniel Craig) is still smarting over the death of Vesper Lynd and desperate to exact revenge. Frenetic, full of chase sequences and sudden switches in location, the film has a demented energy about it, as if it’s taking his feverish tempo from Bond himself. He – we learn early on – is “running wild”.

Barely five minutes into the film and we have been whisked from Siena to Port-au-Prince via London. Cars have screeched round mountain-top roads. Bond has been shown racing through gutters, alleyways and over rooftops. We’ve seen him in a motorbike and on a boat. Not much later, he’s in a plane.

In interviews in advance of the film, the director, Marc Forster, had talked about Bond as if the secret agent was a latterday Hamlet – a character who beneath his hard shell is vulnerable and repressed. The way he explores the tortured psyche of cinema’s favourite spy isn’t through lengthy dialogue sequences – it’s through action. There is something desperate about Bond. Craig plays him with a gimlet-eyed intensity that makes his first turn in the role in Casino Royale seem lightweight. David Arnold’s rousing score seems to be driving him on.

The drawback to the frenetic approach is that the chases risk merging into one another. Comic relief is in short supply. We don’t have any boffins introducing new gadgets.

Craig’s Bond may still sweet talk receptionists, but he doesn’t spend much time about it. Nor does this Bond have much time for womanising. As Camille, Olga Kurylenko isn’t just Bond’s lover: she is his mirror. He’s cut up about Vesper. She is equally traumatised by incidents involving some wicked Bolivian general during her childhood. It isn’t sexual attraction that brings them together. It’s a shared desire for revenge. The plot, reassuringly, is sheer hokum – a far-fetched yarn about rogue environmentalist Dominic Greene’s plans to topple the Bolivian government, put a military dictator in power and gain control of most of Latin America’s water supply. Greene is really working for the shadowy organisation Quantum, which has secret agents everywhere, including – as M (Judi Dench) discovers – at the heart of the British secret service.

Among the main pleasures of an uneven Bond movie is Dench’s wonderful performance. She is more in evidence here than in her previous Bond movies and has a relationship with 007 that is maternal and flirtatious. Nothing flusters Dench’s M. In one tremendous scene, we see her running her bath and dabbing at her face with wipes as she gives orders to operatives around the world to curb Bond’s movements.

Gemma Arterton is also good value as Agent Fields at the British consulate in Bolivia, a siren with a touch of St Trinians about her, saying “oh gosh” when she sends one of Greene’s henchmen flying.

There is a tension at the heart of the movie. On the one hand, this is an out-and-out action flick. On the other, Forster (the director of arthouse hits such as Monster’s Ball and Stranger Than Fiction) is trying to show us the paranoia and loneliness of a homicidal spy’s life. The set-pieces are supposed to be exhilarating but also reveal Bond’s anger and bereavement. One of the film’s most ingenious scenes is when Bond interrupts the villains during a performance of Tosca at the Bregenz Festival House in Austria. While the performers are singing about love and vengeance on the stage, Bond is in the wings, fighting with Greene’s henchmen. Opera plots are often far-fetched and illogical. We shouldn’t be surprised that Bond movies are the same. At their best, they provide us with the same excitement and escapism.

Quantum Of Solace doesn’t seem like a major entry in the Bond canon. Well under two hours long, it’s shorter and more frenetic than most of its predecessors, and an often-jolting experience to watch. Loose ends about. What it does have, though, above all, is vigour. The franchise hasn’t run out of juice quite yet. 3/5

James Bond is back, and this time it’s mighty personal. Daniel Craig’s craggy agent picks up exactly where he left off in another bruising thriller that leaves you feeling both drained and exhilarated.

There are hand-to-hand fights that make your eyes water and old-school stunts involving motorbikes, speedboats, jet fighters and expensive cars that give you whiplash just looking at them. Really, nobody does it better than the new 007.

What makes Marc Forster’s film such an intriguing watch is that this is the first of the 22 Bond movies where the plot flows organically from the last instalment, and Quantum of Solace looks a far stronger picture for this rare continuity.

Needless to say the plot is as forbidding as the title. After the death of his girlfriend, Vesper Lynd, at the end of Casino Royale, Bond mixes revenge and duty dangerously as he hunts down the shadowy group that blackmailed Lynd to betray him.

A link to a bank account in Haiti puts Bond on the scent of Mathieu Amalric’s chief creep and ruthless businessman, Dominic Greene. All great Bond adversaries are generously blessed with kinks and quirks and Greene is no different. Amalric has a wonderfully wormy arrogance.

His sidekick, Elvis (Anatole Taubman), sports a monkish fringe, and Tarantino bad looks. But it’s the manner in which Amalric manages to poison all trust in Bond, even from his nearest and dearest, that makes him one of the classic arch-adversaries.

Cold rage threatens to derail Bond’s mission to crack Greene’s dastardly organisation known as Quantum, and I doubt that there’s a better actor at bottling rage than Daniel Craig.

All muscles, he has defined himself as a darker and more bare-knuckle Bond than any of his elegant predecessors.

The deadpan humour is still there. And despite the occasional blasts of visceral and grisly violence, Craig is threatening to become the most popular 007 yet, certainly with the younger generation.

Even the famous Bond babes seem to be getting tougher. Olga Kurylenko’s stunning, hard-as-nails beauty, Camille, has her own private vendetta that she wants to bring to a bloody conclusion, with or without Bond’s help. And Gemma Arterton’s effortlessly foxy Agent Field appeals to the better side of the wounded anti-romantic.

“Do you know how angry I am at myself,” says the naked, raven-haired M16 agent as Bond kisses his way up her spine. But Bond rarely lets a life-threatening difference of opinion get in the way of a decent flirt.

The familiar faces returning from Casino Royale pose a far more subtle, acidic test for Bond who has to tread carefully around treacherous old friends: Jeffrey Wright’s lugubrious CIA agent Felix Leiter; Giancarlo Giannini’s silky string-puller, René Mathis; Jesper Christensen’s duplicitous Mr White; and Judi Dench, of course, as his witheringly unimpressed boss, M.

“When you can’t tell your friends from your enemies it’s time to go,” growls Dench.

Of course, Bond is having none of it. There are new necks to break and toys to play with as the action rips across Austria, Italy, and South America.

The global stakes are as precarious as ever. Amalric’s masterplan to destabilise a South American regime, install a dodgy dictator, General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio), and take control of the biggest source of fresh water in the world is fabulously cock-eyed. But that’s one of the main reasons why we can’t get enough of the greatest franchise of them all.

The director, Marc Forster, has absorbed the lucrative lessons discovered in Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale. He has also managed to pace his sequel much better. Royale felt slightly wheel-clamped by one too many longeurs. If anything, the crunching chase sequences in Quantum of Solace are even more magnificently dangerous. And the daredevil leaps and tumbles through glass roofs are just as sensational as the splintering high-speed pyrotechnics.

But it’s the amount of heartache and punishment that Craig’s new Bond absorbs that makes him look so right for our times.

Bond is no longer a work in progress. He is now the cruel, finished article. 4/5

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