Well, if I’m going to keep my word about reviewing every Daniel Craig James Bond film, I’ll eventually find myself in a difficult position when it comes to Quantum of Solace. Many Bond fans don’t like it and would probably see no issue with my skipping it and jumping straight to Skyfall. But I didn’t take any short cuts and at least I can say that for the first time I watched it all the way through with no breaks.
Quantum of Solace was released in 2008 and was the second Bond film to star Daniel Craig in the role, with Marc Forster of Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction fame taking over from Martin Campbell as director. Forster claimed he wasn’t a Bond fan before Casino Royale.
We begin with a car chase that has no impact whatsoever apart from being at attempt to get the viewer’s attention. It also demonstrates the way Forster will direct the rest of the film, mostly using the technique called ‘shaky cam’ that is supposed to look more realistic but often makes it hard to get a clear grasp of what’s going on. But I’ll get more into that later. Despite being shot at and trashing his car as usual, Bond succeeds in bringing Mr White (Jesper Christensen) to an MI6 safe house in Siena, Italy for interrogation and that’s all just in the pre-title sequence.
Bond along with M (Judi Dench) interrogate Mr White and Christensen does his best to act amused that MI6 have no idea who he works for. That is, until M’s bodyguard Mitchell (Glenn Foster) is revealed to be a traitor, shoots Mr White, Bond chases and kills him, and we are treated to more less-than-admirable camerawork.
Bond does some more investigating and finds and kills another man called Edmund Slate (Neil Jackson) in Haiti. Not long after that we have a new Bond Girl in Bolivian Secret Service Agent Camile Rivero (Olga Kurylenko) and our two main villains: businessman Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) and his deposed dictator cohort General Medrano (Joaquín Cosío). They have plans for Bolivia’s water supply and Bond has to put a stop to their plan, but due to personal connections to the mission, his professionalism is called into question.
Positives first: Daniel Craig’s second attempt at Bond is fine, he seems a little more aggressive because of what happened in the previous film, but some moments of charm and humour wouldn’t go amiss either. Judi Dench as M is really just there so Bond can have someone to talk to as an equal and does her job well. Basically, anyone who was in Casino Royale is perfectly fine in their roles.
Many of the newcomers don’t offer much. Amalric especially is not threatening in the slightest despite his unusual-looking eyes. Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre in the previous film had charm and charisma, but this guy has none. Giancarlo Giannini and Jeffery Wright reprise their Casino Royale roles but are really just there to maintain the notion that this is a sequel to Royale. I was surprised to see David Harbour appearing from time to time – he’s actually not too bad in the role of a CIA section chief, but I only noticed him because he’s since become familiar as Jim Hooper in Stranger Things.
Apart from all that, this is truly a lesser Bond film. Bond is meant to stand out from the crowd of spy action thrillers, but thanks to the ‘shaky cam’ style of directing it’s impossible to distinguish this from one of the many Bourne clones that came out around the same time. If this hadn’t been a Bond film I think it would have been forgotten very easily. The ‘shaky cam’ reaches its peak with a sequence in an opera house where there is a lot of running, screaming, gunshots and complete silence, but no clear picture of what is actually happening.
The violence in this film is unusually brutal, yet also somehow bland and uninvolving – another product of the studio thinking that the way forward was ‘dark and gritty reboot’. Films like Casino Royale (and Batman Begins) did make heavy use of this approach but both of those films took the time to have the occasional joke. There’s very little of Bond’s signature charm, humour or sophistication to be found here. Basically, any time there is, ‘action shaky cam’ is not far behind.
Around the time this film was being made, there was a writers’ strike in the USA which had quite an impact on TV and film. Two notable examples were this film and season seven of the tv show 24, which got a special set in Africa and then a full season when the strike was done. Quantum chose a slightly different approach. Bond scriptwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, along with Paul Haggis, are credited with writing the script. But when the strike hit, the film had to be finished somehow so Forster and Craig himself worked on it together… and look how that turned out. No wonder there is just scene after scene of Bond going from one fight to another. The pacing is also unbearable. The runtime says 104 minutes but due to many scenes of boring conversations it feels longer. Even the climax feels underwhelming and not particularly earned. Not to mention the new characters are fairly bland, from the villains to the main Bond Girl who has a tragic backstory but any sympathy for her can only feel superficial.
David Arnold is back to do the score, but of course I want to focus on the main theme song Another Way To Die by Alicia Keys and Jack White. It’s perfectly fine and nowhere near as bad as many will tell you, but I can only hear Keys’ voice on it. I know White wrote the song but I can’t hear him doing much. I think I might have preferred the supposed rejected theme by Shirley Bassey entitled No Good about Goodbye.
Forster took the basic starting point of ‘dark and gritty Bond’ and came up with just another bland, generic spy thriller with lots of shaky cam. Oh, and complete with unnecessary and pretentious stylised fonts for just about every new location Bond visits. It feels weird to say this, but the tie-in game for the PS3 that featured the completed material of the Casino Royale game was way better than this film, which really says something about the quality.
I know Quantum of Solace has its fans somewhere, but if you want to watch something that actually feels like a Bond film, this is best avoided at all costs.
