Quantum of Solace

[silverscreenselect]

We saw Quantum of Solace (the new James Bond movie) last night and it was a huge disappointment. After Casino Royale, which may have been the best Bond movie ever made (certainly the best since the 1960s), this one could well be the worst. It is a complete mess, a total failure on virtually every level.

Most of the Bond movies have been directed by competent but not acclaimed directors (I doubt any of them had any Oscar nominations), who specialized in just letting the action, the gadgets, the girls and the one-line quips speak for themselves. This one was done by Marc Forster, who did The Kite Runner, Finding Neverland, and Monster's Ball. He is good at bringing out the nuances of a complicated script, but he doesn't know the first thing about making an action movie.

The action scenes in this film are totally incomprehensible. A good action scene has establishing shots, longer range shots that let the audience know what the terrain is and where the characters are so that their movements make sense. This one just tosses one brief shot after another, so that fights, jumps, explosions and so forth whiz by so quickly you don't really know what's going on. You might expect this is a cheap, low budget movie in which the director was trying to disguise having had to cut a lot of corners in producing the scene; but this is a $200 million film on which they obviously spent a ton of money for stunts and special effects work, none of which can be appreciated on screen.

The film's villain is also a big letdown, a sleazeball industrialist who wants to control Bolivia's water supply and sell it back to the Bolivians at exorbitant prices. He is part of a shadowy worldwide conspiracy (similar to SPECTRE in the early Bond films) that is so powerful and so clever that no one in Western intelligence knew they existed. That has the makings for either Dr. Evil campiness or a legitimate mass conspiracy thriller but neither avenue is explored very well. Instead we get the main villain who seems more like Ferris Bueller's French cousin who has just been caught by the principal after playing hooky than the type of suave megalomaniacs who usually frequent the Bond movies.

This is the shortest Bond movie and it could really have used another fifteen minutes or so to better explain the confusing story line and explore Bond's psyche a little better. Daniel Craig is terrific as Bond and he has a great relationship with Judi Dench as M, but his character conflict, which drove Casino Royale, only comes out in brief isolated bits and pieces. There's also no gadgets, none of the traditional Bond one-liners and the familiar Bond score and roving eye optical gimmick don't even appear until the final credits.

Sadly, this movie despite critical bashing, did almost $70 million over the weekend, while much better Bond films didn't do nearly as well. The film does lead logically into another sequel in which, hopefully, they can develop Bond's character in a much more coherent fashion and return to the terrific action sequences the series is known for. In the meantime, this movie is a major misfire.