Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/15/08
Like
a cinematic Methuselah, James Bond strides through the decades, in a constant
state of recasting and reinvention to suit the times in which he's filmed.
How unfortunate, then, for the year 2008 to find that OUR James Bond is
a homicidal automaton of soulless expediency, stripped of all that once
made him cool and fun. Quantum of Solace, the 22nd official
James Bond movie (24 if you count the oddities Never Say Never Again
and the 1967 comedy Casino Royale), is a dull, dispiriting action
extravaganza that takes the revisionist tone of its' popular predecessor
(the non-comedy Casino Royale) as a cue
to go all-in on a Bond with a lot more in common with Matt Damon's humorless
blank slate Jason Borne than Ian Flemming's creation. The origin
story Royale cast Daniel Craig as a thuggish
agent whose adventure at a high-stakes poker game forced him to take on
the stylish attributes we were assured would later become second nature.
But its' sequel is all thug and no style, a smattering of halfway decent
character scenes sprinkled amidst surprisingly boring stunt sequences that
suggest Marc Forster (whose Stranger than Fiction was my favorite
movie of 2006) should never direct an action movie again.
Shaken
and stirred by the death of Vesper Lynd at the end of Casino
Royale, James Bond (Daniel Craig) has nabbed Mr. White (Jesper Christensen),
an operative in the secret organization for which she was a double-agent.
But when White says this organization has people everywhere, he means it,
and the resulting attack on Bond and his boss M (Judi Dench) leaves them
without a lead. He is, of course, James Bond, so it's no time at
all before he's killing his way from one thread to another and has discovered
environmentalist Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) is a highly-placed operative
in QUANTUM. The big Q is working behind the scenes to destabilize
governments and control natural resources, currently about to install General
Medrano (Joaquin Cosio) as the leader of Bolivia in exchange for acres
of seemingly worthless dessert land. The Americans believe he'll
find oil there, and nasty CIA spook Greg Beam (David Barbour) is happy
to barter Bond's life for that black gold, over the objections of old pal
Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright). But what is QUANTUM's real plan?
Perhaps ex-Bolivian agent Camille (Olga Kurylenko), who's been using Greene
as a way to get vengefully close to Medrano, can help him find out.
If
all that doesn't sound terribly exciting, it's not, but Quantum of Solace
wouldn't be the first Bond movie to use a dull-as-dust criminal conspiracy
as a clothesline upon which to hang dazzling action sequences, beautiful
women, and silky-smooth daring-do. But while it's able to fire up
the most interesting relationships from Casino
Royale (with M, Leiter and Giancarlo Giannini's Inspector Mathis) in
the few scenes they spend together, QofS can't really get any of
the other Bond stuff to work. Yes, the action scenes are bruising,
and must have been brutal to shoot (memo to the production: you can
digitally paint skin color over a black eye, but it still looks like a
black eye, and Craig's well-publicized hard knocks are evident on-screen).
But they're also presented to us in a passive, matter-of-fact way, catastrophically
pieced together in the worst Michael Bay-inspired storm of hacksaw editing
possible, and backed by the least interesting of David Arnold's six Bond
scores. My mind kept wandering during the action, and even now, just
hours after I saw it, I'm hard-pressed to remember the point-to-point details
of the plot. I know Bond action scenes tend to fall into specific
categories (after all these movies, how could they not?), but there's a
“been there, done that” feel to most of them, and only an elaborate struggle
between Bond and a henchman dangling from ropes attached to crumbling scaffolding
doesn't feel like an item on a checklist. Yes, I complained that
Casino
Royale's climax was lumbering and unexciting, but at least it tried
to be an event. Quantum of Solace is headed toward a series
of explosions that serve the same purpose as the erupting volcanoes that
used to signal an end to Doug McClure's adventures on mysterious islands:
we're out of ideas, let's blow some stuff up. Following their thoughtful
(albeit a tad dry) work on Royale, writers
Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis & Robert Wade disappoint with the really low
quality of their dialog. A scene where Greene postures with Bond
and Camille at a party feels like they wrote down everything the characters
would euphemistically hint at and then forgot to translate it into euphemisms.
It's
all so lifeless and drab. I'm sure you could find all kinds of exciting
ways to turn Bond on his ear, but having him enact yet another “rich guy
buying up stuff for evil purposes” story WITHOUT ordering his martini “shaken,
not stirred”, introducing himself as “Bond. James Bond.” or gambling
in a casino to let the villains know he's in town leaves us with an empty
shell of a movie. Bond is angry, Bond is violent, Bond doesn't care
who gets hurt. All that is clear from the opening scene: what
else have you got? I have to say that while Craig does everything
that's asked of him, the movie made me seriously question the limitations
of his take on the role. Is this a man who can ever “become” James
Bond, or are we always going to be assured that “he's getting there...”?
So,
what does work? Whenever Forster's not busy bungling the action,
his command of drama is evident in the little moments between the characters.
Dench never really clicked with Pierce Brosnan, but her M was made for
Craig: their prickly chemistry is kinda like a really vicious Mother
and Son relationship, and how many movie tough guys ever have surrogate
Mother figures? Giannini does every last thing he can to pump up
his scenes, and his last one is a show-stopper. The one scene between
Bond and Leiter is a gem, although Felix spends most of the movie taking
a (not unjustified) beating for the current state of US foreign policy.
Barbour plays Greg Beam almost like a comic gay cowboy, but, hey, this
is a British movie and that's kinda the image we're projecting these days.
While
the movie doesn't even attempt to hit as many of its' Bond marks as it
should, the franchise is as much an obsessive-compulsive ritual as a cinematic
one, so allow me to just tick off the remaining bullet points:
THE
GIRLS: Camille is one of those “alternative” Bond girls, a vengeful,
non-sexual partner for the hero. The lovely Kurylenko (the less said
about casting a Russian as a Bolivian, the better) does her best, but like
many past “tough Bond Girls” (think Carey Lowell in Licence to Kill,
of which Quantum of Solace is a sort of inferior remake), her character
still ends up as a blubbering “help me James!” mess more often than she
should. Gemma Atkinson plays “Strawberry Fields”, an eye-rolling
name even the movie is so ashamed of it never speaks it aloud. She's
actually quite good in a retro sort of way, giving the movie a short-lived
blast of good cheer when she's on screen and closing her appearance with
a shocking visual reference that will drive Bond Movie Geeks mad.
THE
VILLAIN: Dominic Greene is all wrong, one way or another.
Amalric plays him as a hissable, oily heel, but when we're presented with
the notion that this man's cover is as an internationally known environmentalist
and humanitarian, the people who applaud his rambling, sinister speech
at a fundraiser seem even crazier than he is. I understand he's just
a middleman at QUANTUM, but even so, this is our villain, so couldn't he
be a bit more imposing? Fun party game: try to figure out what
QUANTUM stands for. The producers say it's not an acronym, but then
why is it all caps? I nominate Quorum Underwriting Aggressive Nationalism,
Threatening Ultimatums and Monopolies.
THE
SONG/OPENING CREDITS: Ugh. Jack White and Alicia Keys offer
up the first ever Bond Theme Duet, “Another Way to Die”. White's
sinister verses play a lot better than Keys' jazzy chorus, but either way
the song limps and drags along in a way befitting the movie it's introducing.
The opening credits sequence disguises nude women with sand (not bad) and
70's-style album cover graphics (I think I mentioned “Ugh”) in a less than
memorable manner.
I tend
to assign star ratings to movies I didn't like this way: one star
if I found the movie to have virtually no redeeming features, one and a
half if it's awful but has its' moments, and two starts if it doesn't really
have much going for it but isn't painful to watch. Quantum of
Solace isn't really painful to watch, in fact it was as difficult to
focus my attention on as any movie I've reviewed on this site. It's
a bloated mass of pointless violence occasionally interrupted by attempts
at plot, and more likely to entertain fans of cold-blooded action flicks
than the James Bond legacy. I've seen the last 8 Bond movies (starting
with The Living Daylights) in the theater, and this is the worst
of that Dalton/Brosnan/Craig era. As it has so often before, the
franchise stands at a crossroads. Only “Bond 23” as Craig's third
outing is now cleverly known, will answer the question of whether Quantum
of Solace represents a mere bump in the road or the dark future of
British heroism. |
