Quantum of Solace

Perhaps Quantum of Solace was always destined not to live up to expectations, coming off the back of the barnstorming, franchise revitalising Casino Royale. Quantum of Solace is often marked out as the worst in the series. Bad Bond girl, bad villain, too violent, not fun, and weird title song and weird title - this blog isn't going to change your mind if you think this already, but hopefully I can shift you from thinking it is the worst film ever (I mean really, you should just go and watch Diamonds are Forever for something worse). 

Quantum of Solace is a first for the series, a true, proper sequel. Normally the series' instalments can be watched in roughly any order, with little reference in one film or what took place before it. Not with Quantum of Solace with it picking up the action presumably minutes after Bond lays claim to Mr White at the end of Casino Royale. The film follows Bond on a bloody path of revenge against the shadowy organisation behind Mr White, Quantum, responsible for the death of his love, Vesper Lynd. How he goes about this is generally ripping to pieces anyone who stands in his way.

Not since Licence to Kill has Bond been so cold blooded. He stabs into necks, leaves a man to die by stranding him the middle of the desert with some with a can of motor oil for sustenance, and dumps a close ally's body in a rubbish skip. It is an understandable frame of mind for Bond with Vesper having found and then broken his heart in Casino Royale. And Daniel Craig has no difficulty imbuing Bond with a quiet rage, letting his actions do the talking. This does leave Bond with little to say in the film, which can be read as a lack of character but I don't read it that way. This is Bond with almost complete emotional shutdown and I like the idea of seeing him completely untethered from the responsibilities of his duty to MI6. Another less charitable reading is that production of the film was hit by the writer's strike, which lead to members of production, including Craig himself, writing the film during shooting. 

So whilst I can see some merit in Bond's character through the writing and action, the overall plot and villain is a little mumbled. Through Mr White, Bond learns that he works for Quantum, a shadowy SPECTRE like organisation, with its fingers in many pies, and for this movie it is focused on Boliva. The face of Quantum in this film, although importantly not its head, is Mathieu Amalric's slimy Dominic Greene. Greene perhaps suffers the worst from the lack of plot development, showing up in only a couple of scenes, although he does get some sharp lines. His introduction is a confusing scene as a double cross, and then replacement of a wannabe assassin is explained (or not). The most nuanced aspect of his character is the fact that the CIA is happy to let him run rampant in Boliva so long as they get a cut of any oil found. 

Dominic's overall plan is simply to topple a Bolivian leader, install a corrupt General, who in exchange will agrees to him buying an apparently barren patch of land. Turns out that land has allowed him to siphon Boliva's water supply so that he can effectively hold that utility over Boliva and carve out a tidy profit. It is nicely modern plot, and Quantum's machinations with the various interested parties, are particularly cutting towards how modern politics often sees leaders who often consider the "good guys" do deals with those we consider clear bad guys. However, again perhaps through the effects of the writer's strike Bond's actually investigation into this plot really just sees him jet setting about the globe, walking into a room, and waiting about 5 minutes before starting to shoot it up.

The female lead suffers from a paradoxical lack of development and too much development. Olga Kurylenko's Camille is, like Bond, a woman of few words, and also on personal mission of vengeance. We get the full details of why she seeks her pound of flesh, but those motivations are so cookie cutter that there's little for us to latch on to. Bond's own motivations are hardly novel, however they have the benefit of us actually having seen the genesis of that motivation. Camille simply tells us about her baggage. One unique angle for her is that Bond and Camille have zero romantic contact with one another, bar an impassioned kiss once the dust settles. This is no kiss that fades out before it moves on to something more. This is a kiss of Camille in the hope of granting Bond some peace, before she walks off into the sunset, her mission completed. 

So this could have been the Bond film where Bond does the unthinkable but actually keeps it in his pants, or if he had to do it, it was handled in the same way that his clearly burgeoning alcoholism is handled: with a sense of gravity. But nope, Bond gets a mid-mission bonk with Agent Fields, played by Gemma Arterton (first name not disclosed in the film but the credits tell me it is Strawberry). This shag happens, cinematically at least, in the blink of an eye, with some retro pre and post-coitus dialogue between the pair. But it just doesn't fit the mood of the rest of the film, its just there to have a box ticked, so to speak. Contrast this to her death, drowned in oil, her body found in the hotel room, an jet black recreation of the golden body scene in Goldfinger. 

More successful in the ally department is Judie Dench's M, and and Giancarlo Giannini's Rene Mathis. M shows ongoing concern for Bond's spiral into unchecked violence, despairing at the long list of bodies that Bond is leaving in his wake. Rene Mathis is brought back into the fold, with a small chip on his shoulder, having been shaken down by MI6 when they believed he was the traitor, and not Vesper in Casino Royale. The few scenes between Mathis and Bond are well done, with Mathis an older man imparting the wisdom of an agent who was seen and made the same mistakes that Bond has and is going to go on to make. His death scene is the closest the film has to showing a little heart between the brutality, and it works. 

And there is a lot of brutality, often smartly shot and framed, except in moments of high octane action. Unfortunately, the director took too much of a leaf from the book of Bourne, and as such nearly every action scene is shot with shaky cam and edited with aggression, the opening car chase probably being the worst offender. That isn't to say that the scenes don't get the pulse racing but they aren't always comprehensible. However, an opera shootout was made with more care, crosscutting between the action and the performance of Toska. 

The film ends with Bond having confronted and exposed the Quantum agent who ensnared Vesper, discarding her necklace in the snow, and walking away. Despite the rough ride that it takes Bond to get to this point through the film, this marks the end of his origin story, further emphasised by the introduction of the gun barrel sequence at the very end of the film. As much as I like the following two films, I still  would've liked them to keep the more realistic tone that Casino Royale set up, and Quantum of Solace ran and stumbled with. In that way, Craig's films would have a more coherent arc, and instead we have, at the time of writing, a tenure of 2 halves - two angling the Bond trappings through a hard edged filter, and two more looking back to Bond of old, but updating it for a modern audience.