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THE GUARDIAN
by Peter Bradshaw
He's back. Daniel Craig
allays any fear that he was just a one-Martini Bond, with this, his second
007 adventure, the perplexingly named Quantum Of Solace.
I've got to admit that this didn't excite me as much as Casino Royale
and the villain is especially underpowered. But Craig personally has the
chops, as they say in Hollywood. He's made the part his own, every inch
the coolly ruthless agent-cum-killer, nursing a broken heart and coldly
suppressed rage. If the Savile Row suit with the Beretta shoulder holster
fits, wear it. And he's wearing it.
This is a crash-bang Bond, high on action, low on quips, long on location
glamour, short on product placement. |
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Under the direction of
Marc Forster, the movie ladles out the adrenalin in a string of deafening
episodes: car chases, plane wrecks, motor boat collisions. If it's got an
engine, and runs on fuel, and can crash into another similarly powered
vehicle, with Bond at the wheel, and preferably with a delicious female
companion in the passenger seat - well, it goes in the movie.
There are plenty of references to other Bond moments. A horribly dangerous
skydive recalls The Spy Who Loved Me. A pile-up in Haiti which
spills a macabre lorryload of coffins recalls the voodoo creepiness of
Live And Let Die. And, most outrageously of all, the grotesque daubing
of a female corpse brings back Goldfinger - though Sean Connery got
an awful lot more mileage out of that sort of thing.
As in Casino Royale, the famous John Barry theme tune is saved up
until the end; a baffling, decision, I always think, not to use this
thrilling music at the beginning of the film.
Bond has hardly got his 007 spurs, when he's infuriating M, Judi Dench,
with his insolence and insubordination. Out in the field, he's whacking
enemy agents in short, sharp, bone-cracking bursts of violence when he
should be bringing them in for questioning.
In theory, he is out to nail a sinister international business type:
Dominic Greene, played by French star Mathieu Amalric, who under a
spurious ecological cover plans to buy up swaths of South American desert
and a portfolio of Latin American governments to control the water supply
of an entire continent. As Greene, Amalric has the maddest eyes, creepiest
leer, and dodgiest teeth imaginable.
Clearly, Bond has to take this fellow down. But he also wants to track
down the man who took his beloved Vesper away from him in the previous
movie: he is pathologically seeking payback, and to the fury of his
superiors, this is getting personal. But it hasn't stopped him cultivating
female company in the traditional, fantastically supercilious manner. His
companions are as demurely submissive as ever. Olga Kurylenko plays
Camille, a mysterious, smouldering figure, out to wreak vengeance on the
corrupt Bolivian dictators who killed her family.
Britain's Gemma Arterton plays Agent Fields; she greets 007 wearing a
trenchcoat with apparently little underneath, like some sort of MI6
strippogram. And she is the recipient of his ardour in the luxury hotel
suite - that quintessential Bond habitat. This movie is, in fact, a
reminder of how vital hotels are in Bond films, providing the essential
narrative grammar: the checking in, the fight with the stranger in the
room, the messages left at reception, the luxury cars lovingly
photographed outside.
I was disappointed there was so little dialogue, flirtation and
characterisation in this Bond: Forster and his writers Paul Haggis, Neal
Purvis and Robert Wade clearly thought this sort of sissy nonsense has to
be cut out in favour of explosions. Well, perhaps that is what Bond fans
want (not this Bond fan, though). But I was also baffled that relatively
little was made of the deliciously villainous Amalric: especially the
final encounter.
But set against this is the cool, cruel presence of Craig - his lips
perpetually semi-pursed, as if savouring some new nastiness his opponents
intend to dish out to him, and the nastiness he intends to dish out in
return. This film, unlike the last, doesn't show him in his powder-blue
swimming trunks (the least heterosexual image in 007 history), but it's a
very physical performance. Quantum of Solace isn't as good as
Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig's Bond debut has been toned
down in favour of conventional action. But the man himself powers this
movie; he carries the film: it's an indefinably difficult task for an
actor. Craig measures up. 3/5 |
