Review: Quantum of Solace

An anguished Bond for these anxious times.

There’s a theory, which I don’t necessarily believe is airtight, that the James Bond movies often reflect the spirit of the times of their release. Sean Connery’s films showed the Cold War as a Jet Age go-go romp, while the Roger Moore years of the 1970s were self-loathing and oversexed. Timothy Dalton’s late-80s/Early 90s films were directionless and tepid, while Pierce Brosnan’s luxuriated tenure in the late 90s and early 00’s was cleverly marketed but not particularly substantial.

I think the creators of Quantum of Solace, and also its predecessor Casino Royale, want to bulldoze any such ambiguity. Their Bond is a secret agent for right now: resentful and vaguely bitter, and more than a little pissed off at his surrounding turn of events. This political relevance, mixed with jaw-dropping stunts equal to the Bond tradition, make the new film a hell of a ride. It might be the shortest Bond film yet and the most expensive, but you won’t feel the one or begrudge the other.

Picking up almost immediately where Casino Royale left off, the film presents Daniel Craig’s muscular, almost thuggish Bond determined to get vengeance for the death of Vesper Lynd, his lover in the previous film who died protecting him. When a betrayal close to M (Judi Dench, splendidly imperious as ever) almost causes her death, Bond lights out to track down his only lead. Along the way he crosses paths with Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a Bolivian Secret Service agent who’s infiltrated Lynd’s organization on her own mission of vengeance. Their righteous paths intersect at Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a land developer with a cruel agenda beneath the Bolivian desert.

The plot only gets trickier from there, expanding to include a cat and mouse game above an opera house in Austria, a firefight amid a roaring inferno within a luxury hotel, and an intense airplane dogfight and parachute drop in dizzying closeup detail. Again, the senses of modernization and of back-to-basics is unmistakable: the Bond of the nifty gadgets is gone, replaced by an agent fighting the laws of physics to stay alive. Even when Craig gets the chance to be smug, as when discovering the cabal’s members at the opera house, or when indulging in a fling with British embassy worker Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), the surrounding menace makes the bon vivance seem elusive at best.

Screenwriters Paul Haggis (Crash) and Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Die Another Day) keep the tension mounting, closing in the walls on Bond and whomever chooses to side with him. When Fields is murdered, her body allows a clever homage to a classic Bond image that also makes a shrewd comment on how standards of wealth have changed in the last half-century. It’s a startlingly clever story beat, made all the more memorable by this new Bond’s compassion for her fate. But her death also gets Bond’s agent status revoked, so that for the film’s third act he’s acting of his own will. Fittingly, Craig plays his role as a man who buries his pain just deep enough to keep him on mission.

Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) keeps the script’s momentum moving, even if some of the non-action sequences have trouble finding an effective pace. Watch Camille’s first conversation on the dock with Greene – it drags on and on, while Bond waits around off-camera. A later scene between Bond and Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) flies by like a bullet, not entirely making sense nor earning its keep in the plot. But the action sequences are the film’s strength – along with Craig’s increasingly Robert Ryan-like charisma – and those are superbly pulled off. Fans of the Jason Bourne trilogy will recognize those films’ influence in Bond’s fistfights, including an early apartment-set dust-up between Bond and a hitman that ends with such glacial calm that the audience is tempted to mistake what’s happening.

Craig is ably assisted by a stronger than usual cast. Kurylenko brings depth to the tortured Camille, while Dench’s M conveys a subtle maternal instinct for Bond that doesn’t impede her professionalism. Amalric is wonderfully reptilian as the conniving Greene, and Giancarlo Giannini (Man On Fire), reprising his Casino Royale role as Mathis, communicates both class and an oddly endearing Old World melancholy. Bond films have traditionally used their supporting casts as little more than talking window dressing, so the overt attempt to flesh out the human wreckage left in Bond’s wake is both overdue and welcome.

One final caveat: the film assumes its audience clearly remembers the events of Casino Royale, so a repeat viewing of that original before seeing this sequel will likely help you avoid confusion. Though it’s not necessary, it’ll help you understand the larger forces at work within the overarching story, forces that extend into the next installment even as this film concludes.

- Michael Kabel
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