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With Casino Royale, director Martin Campbell, along with regular producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, accomplished a very difficult task with deceptive ease: they rebooted James Bond, making him relevant to the current age, while still retaining the fundamentals that make him essentially Bond. (The same team managed a similar task, although somewhat differently, with 1995's GoldenEye.) It obviously helped that they had one of Ian Fleming's original novels - his first - as source material, and that is not a luxury shared by Quantum of Solace. The much-discussed title is one of Fleming's, but the short story shares nothing in common with the events of the film. It's something that quickly becomes apparent; Quantum's storyline is rather murky, lacking a central hook, and indeed it sometimes feels like there is no plot at all, just a succession of increasingly bombastic action scenes.
When the film is broken down into its (very many) component parts, several key Bond components can be identified: exotic locations, mysterious women, a villain with an elaborate base and a nefarious scheme (here it's all environment-related). It's just a pity that they're all buried deep in a film that's trying too hard to get away from everything that has made the series so successful for almost five decades. The destinations to which Bond travels - and there is more jetsetting here than in any previous instalment - flash by so fast that by the time we've started to get a taste of a certain location, we're off to another one. It's exhausting, in a bad way, and unnecessary, as it just makes the film confusing and harder to keep track with. The worst casualty of this obsession with lightning pacing is the South American desert lair of the baddie, which is a great concept wasted by being on screen for all of a couple of minutes.
Paradoxically, given everything that the film tries to do, Quantum is the shortest Bond film ever, at 106 minutes. One of the few criticisms levelled at Casino Royale by some was excessive length, which the producers have clearly taken to heart. Fair enough, perhaps, but there's probably more going on here than in any previous entry. Consequently, it feels like a 3-hour rough cut has been hacked away into a breathless dash, to the extent that sometimes it feels the editor has just halved the length of every single shot within a scene. In action scenes it means that it's often incredibly difficult to see what's happening, while dialogue exchanges are robbed of any natural flow. Any good action film, even ones about Jason Bourne, need a fluctuating rhythm to them or the frequent chases and fights start to blur into each other and lose their impact as a result.
So far, so negative, but this is no Die Another Day. It's just such a comedown from the lofty heights of Casino Royale, one of the best Bonds ever, that it's almost impossible not to pick out the numerous flaws. Daniel Craig is still obviously capable of pulling off both the dramatic and physical scenes - as much as any actor who has played the role - but in Quantum he displays a certain lack of charm, which is probably more a failing of the script than Craig himself. Some responsibility for the failings must also be placed at the feet of director Marc Forster, who is the most important change of personnel since last time and has made a film that feels noticeably un-Bondian. Unlike Casino Royale, there's no real heart to this outing and no real driving force for the narrative (even the revenge quest is relegated to the background for most of the running time). Hopefully, now Bond has found his quantum of solace, with the next instalment we can get back to what we love about the Bond franchise in the first place.
The summary
Quantum of Solace is a decent, and certainly expensive-looking, action film, but it lacks the charm and flair of the best Bonds.
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