Yet with Quantum of Solace, the 22nd official Bond film in 46 years, they have done precisely that, and if that weren’t frustrating enough, they haven’t even done it very well. In the grand tradition of knock-offs, all the surface-level elements are in place, but nobody involved seems to have any understanding of why they are there. This is most noticeable in the film’s dramatically poor editing, which replicates the Bourne films’ rapid-fire pace without consideration for space or action, to such a degree that in two different setpieces, I was unsure which of the two flailing bodies was our hero.
Think of this as a lesson about the need for hiring good hacks. QoS was directed by Marc Forster, one of the most prominent filmmakers ever tapped for a Bond picture (the only director of an arguably greater stature I can think of who won such an honor was Michael Apted, and his effort was the unwatchably bad The World Is Not Enough), and while we can debate endlessly whether being prominent means that he’s whatsoever good, it’s undeniably the case that he has never once attempted anything like an action film before. Which in my opinion makes him a dangerously counter-intuitive choice, but if the good people at EON Productions wanted my opinion, they’d have asked for it.
Compare Forster to Martin Campbell, the director of the wonderful 2006 Bond re-boot Casino Royale: another director who hardly counts a great auteur, but at least all of his films were action-adventures, and as a result his film (like his previous Bond effort, GoldenEye) works perfectly as an anonymously proficient mechanism. I’d hoped that Forster’s lack of directorial personality might work in his favor this time, the Bond films being fairly well-suited to workaday hack directors, and in the slower moments, QoS is as fine a Bond film as we could have hoped for; the problem is that there are so very many action sequences, probably more action-per-minute in this, the shortest Bond vehicle ever, than any other film in the series. And without exception, they all fail. The worst is the car chase which opens the film, clearly modeled on the highly successful The Bourne Supremacy model, but entirely without that film’s pitch-perfect choreography and editing. It’s confusing as hell and the only pleasure involved is the mere fact of observing automotive bodies in motion.
It’s a dreadful irony that Forster should have so little acumen with shooting action, given that QoS is evidently designed to be the action-heavy half of a single vast narrative comprising both this and the preceding film. It was after all one of the more prevalent complaints against Casino Royale that so much of the film was spent inside at a table, and taken together – QoS insists with something close to desperation that we take the two together – the amount of action across the 4+ hours is just about right. Maybe Campbell should have directed the new film and Forster should have taken Casino Royale, I’m not sure.
Starting very shortly after the last film ended, QoS follows James Bond (played once again by Daniel Craig, easily the best thing about the film) as he tries to figure out who was responsible for the giant con played on him and MI6, and particularly who was responsible for the death of his traitorous lover, Vesper Lynd. The convoluted – but not quite insolubly so – narrative sets him on the trail of alleged environmentalist Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), really an operative of the super-secret international criminal syndicate QUANTUM, and a plot to control the world by rationing off Bolivia’s water supply. If the exact details of that were ever laid bare, they evaded me. Meanwhile, Bond crosses paths with a Bolivian woman named Camille (Olga Kurylenko), whose single-minded desire for vengeance is almost as great as his own, though she lacks the benefit of being a trained cold-blooded assassin. Bond’s superior M (Dame Judi Dench), more matronly than ever, alternates between censuring him and smirking in delight as he evades capture for return to England where he is to be debriefed about the large pile of bodies in his wake.
Generally speaking the cast is good: Craig doesn’t have as much to do as he did last time, and that hurts him a little bit (the tortured depths of Bond’s soul don’t get nearly the same plumbing they did in the last film, he’s more of an angry revenge machine), but even without Casino Royale serving as evidence, I’d say there’s enough here to justify the argument that Craig is the best man to don the tux since Connery called it quits the first time. Kurylenko isn’t as good a Bond Girl as Eva Green was in the last film, but that’s hardly a surprise: short of Dame Diana Rigg suiting up for another adventure, I doubt we’ll be seeing a better Bond Girl than Green for many years to come, and Kurylenko convinces us that she’s a strong and driven women despite being kind of twiggy. Amalric is an inspired villain (I’m loving this “European art-house actors” trend in the rebooted series’ villains: first Mads Mikkelsen, now this), oozing creepy reptilian energy and making the screen just a bit clammier every time he steps onscreen. A pity he doesn’t have a good “I expect you to die” moment, but even without the melodrama he’s still somehow melodramatic, all bugged-out eyes and slumpy posture.
Here’s what’s really inexplicable to me: despite having exactly the same writing team as Casino Royale (the only difference is the order in which they’re credited: the new film has Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis & Roger Wade instead of Purvis & Wade and Haggis), QoS has a phenomenally different approach to just about everything. Some of this can obviously be attributed to the simple truth that the last film was an origin story, while this is more of a straight-up spy thriller, but that still doesn’t explain the shift in mood: Casino Royale was among the grimmest Bond films ever, but it still had plenty of time for tongue-in-cheek wit and playfull sexy banter between the spy and his ladyfriend. Whereas QoS is almost entirely without humor, save for a handful of sarcastic asides from M. This isn’t a terrible thing, per se – it worked for, that’s right, the Bourne pictures – but it makes this one of the least “fun” Bond movies in history.
Look, I understand that the World Is Changing, and the old Bond style is old-fashioned, but there’s a huge gulf between splitting the difference, like they did last time, and ending up with one of the very best films in the whole franchise, and jumping recklessly into the grimy, nihilistic style currently in vogue. It ends up with something Not Bondian. The character isn’t just a spy, he’s a bon vivant, and it’s a major part of who he has always been that he likes nice clothes, expensive cars, and snooty drinks. Last time, we saw that mixed in with the harrowing story of a man devouring his soul to become a better killer. This time there’s only the devoured soul, with no wit or class.
Yes, yes, “new Bond”. This is what happens when you refresh a ’60s icon for the modern world, they tell me. Well, you can put Little Orphan Annie in a rape-revenge thriller, and she’s not going to be all pluck and “Tomorrow”, but she’s also no longer going to be Little Orphan Annie. In the same way, Bond isn’t Bond if you take away his Bondisms, and I’m not just talking about the catchphrases and the gadgets. To hell with those. I’m talking about all the things that go to make up Agent 007 on Her Majesty’s secret service. He’s not an interchangeable killer, but that’s awfully close to what QoS has turned him into.
Hopefully, they’ve worked some of this out of their system; a lot of what makes this film the way it is seems to be a byproduct of making it a direct sequel (the franchise’s first), and now that the whole origin story has been told, it seems reasonable to expect at least a tiny return to the heightened reality that served the character well for decades. In short, I pray that it’s James Bond who returns, not some tuxedoed imposter.
5/10