Quantum of Solace: A Horribly Scattershot Sequel

Bookended by Casino Royale on one side and Skyfall on the other, Quantum of Solace is already fighting a losing battle, one not helped by the infamous writer's strike of 2007 that forced star Daniel Craig and director Marc Foster to rewrite scenes on the fly. In fact, this movie went into production before it even had a finished screenplay. Yikes. I won't pretend that Quantum wasn't hurt by factors outside of its control, but that doesn't protect it from itself and what it is, which is one of the furthest falls from grace I've ever seen a sequel take. This movie has no idea what it wants to be, and takes broad sweeps at imitating pretty much any superior action and espionage movie you can name in the hopes of conjuring something coherent from the wreckage of the strike. It is the cinematic equivalent of a plagiarized essay, completely lacking in any sort of personality to call its own. 

I considered skipping telling you what the movie is even about, because it's barely about anything at all. After the unique, well-integrated poker game that Casino Royale leveraged so effectively, evil businessman Dominic Greene's plot to establish a monopoly over the water supply of the relatively underdeveloped Bolivia just feels so uninspired and even innocuous. You technically won't learn that he even wants to do this until later on in the movie, but I don't even mind spilling the beans because a goal like this is just so forgettably tame compared to the aspirations of other, better James Bond villains. There is absolutely nothing interesting about Greene or his plan. The mercifully short hour-and-forty-six-minute runtime consists of little more than an angsty Bond trying to foil his underwhelming schemes, which you already know he will. 007 is still hung up on Vesper's death in the previous movie, but Quantum of Solace is bafflingly content to leave his grief unexplored and use his tortured spirit as a cosmetics lineup.

This movie is intended to be an emotional follow-up to its predecessor, but Bond's inner turmoil over losing Vesper is used more as an edgy flavor of darkness than something to evoke real emotional depth, and God help you if you want him to be anything more complex than brooding. We're not given the nuts and bolts of 007's obviously fractured psyche. We're just shown that he's sad and then asked to accept it without any further elaboration. Craig has lost some of his edge in Quantum of Solace, working against a screenplay that reduces him to vague shades of what made his take on Bond so interesting before, though that's not really his fault. On the level of his facial expressions alone, Craig looks so utterly uninterested in everything that happens in this movie, and his flaming hatred for its production is infamous. Director Marc Foster knew Bond was edgy in the previous movie, but I don't think he understood why, and I get the feeling that Craig was aware.

The villains of Quantum of Solace, the overweight General Medrano and the one-note Dominic Greene, are utterly uninteresting. They are a collection of vague, relaxed antagonist cliches, and fail to find that one distinctive trait that superior Bond villains like Le Chiffre and Silva identified and then entrenched themselves in. They serve more as obligatory obstacles to Bond than as real people with a single twisted wire that makes them evil, a pattern the stronger villains of this franchise tend to follow. They're not just bland. They're safe, clinical even. Le Chiffre wants to avoid death at the hands of those more powerful than him. Silva has a personal grudge with MI6. And Medrano and Greene want to control not people, but things, and their financial greed undercuts their villainy.

Quantum of Solace seems more a product of its time than any of the other movies in the Craig era. The cinematography reeks of 2000s action-movie cliches, dominated by shaky camerawork and shots that last about two-thirds of a second on average. The action is considerably more difficult to follow here than it was in, once again, Casino Royale, which paid an extravagant amount of attention to making sure that everything you saw on the screen made sense spatially. It just feels more like a generic action movie compared to what came before; this is Bond, not Bourne, and I don't think Foster got the message. It's a shame, because the campy old-fashionedness of Bond is present and fleetingly okay, if only because this movie is part of and evocative of a long, storied, and sometimes-incredible franchise. What you're seeing is sometimes interesting. It's just hard for any of it to make sense. 

This movie is something of a "greatest hits" of the series’ tropes, and it fails to find an identity, succeeding only in playing familiar notes at half volume. The strike forced it to go into production without so much as a finished script, a huge part of why it feels like a collection of Bond storylines fed through a chatbot and then glued back together in a different order. It's not that I don't know what it was trying to accomplish. It wants to be a look into the soul of a more tortured 007, but it confuses emotional forcefulness with emotional depth. Quantum of Solace plays it safe with both Bond and what he does, and the result is a story with no intrigue, a conspiracy with no weight, and a Bond with no soul. It is like watching paint dry on the wall of corporate desperation.

After the thrills of a well-shot game of poker, Bond 22 and its espionage movie cliches are just boring, plain and simple. There is nothing to see in this movie that hasn't been done far better in even another Bond movie, and almost from its very opening moments, I was extremely anxious to be done with Quantum of Solace so that I could move on and watch Skyfall, a movie I have some extremely fond memories of. This strikes me as the type of movie that everyone involved in making it would have handed to theater owners with clenched teeth and crossed fingers. Everyone's luck runs out eventually, some more quickly than others. Even luck isn't enough to save this Aston Martin wreck. 

Quantum of Solace - 2/10

1 John 2:15-17