Thing about the picture is this is supposed to be bond?
http://www.examiner.com/x-568-Film-and- ... m11d14-QoSQUANTUM OF SOLACE: ** (out of five)
Here is a James Bond movie in name only - and what an awful name at that. "Quantum of Solace"? It sounds like a new-age album title, or a yoga pose. Anything but a Bond movie.
I wish I could report that the sheer awfulness of the title is deceiving. It's not. As an action movie, "Quantum of Solace" is passable, I guess, if you can handle an eyeball and eardrum assaulting sequence of increasingly ridiculous and incomprehensible set pieces. As a Bond movie, it's a mess.
First off, it's pretty much a straight-up sequel to the previous Bond flick, the far superior "Casino Royale". Don't we usually just drop right into 007's latest absurd adventure and hang on for dear life? "Quantum" requires us to remember all that occurred in "Casino Royale" - the villains, the double-crossings, the girls - in order to make sense of the proceedings. Don't know about you, but I don't want to work that hard at a Bond flick.
One Bond tradition it does uphold is the opening chase scene - and this one's a head-spinning doozy, as Bond guns his Aston Martin through winding, mountainside Italian roads throttled with traffic and miraculously (miraculously!) eludes his pursuers.As shot by director Marc Forster and his editors, though, it's nearly impossible to tell what's going on - cars (all of them black) are revving and crashing, bullets are flying, doors are torn off. Where's Bond? Oh there he is, suddenly pulling placidly into a serene Italian village. Huh? Bond movies always hit the ground running, but this one feels more like running smack into a two-by-four.
And it doesn't improve from there. Turns out, a ghastly eco-activist named - I kid you not - Dominic Greene is planning to take hold of the water supply in Bolivia. Raise your hand if that one just sent shivers down your spine. Thought not. Bond's charge is to stop the dastardly Mr. Greene before all the Bolivian wells run dry, or something like that. What he's more concerned about, though, is avenging the death of Vesper Lynd, the Bond girl who died after apparently betraying him at the end of, you guessed it, "Casino Royale." Getting the idea that it might be a good idea to rent that one if you insist on seeing this one?
There's a Bond girl this time around - her name is Camille, and she's played by a Ukrainian model named Olga Kurylenko, which is a far better Bond girl name than "Camille." The movie's producers seem very proud that Camille is the first Bond girl with whom James Bond does not sleep, but isn't that pretty much the only requirement of a Bond girl?
Not that this Bond would be up for such frivolity, as he's too busy mooning over his lost Vesper. Look, it's not that Daniel Craig is the wrong actor for the role - his menacing take on the iconic character is just as refreshing as it was his first time out - it's just that, as written in "Quantum of Solace," Bond is a bit of a mope. When he's not pummeling some bad guy into submission, he's a dour sort - you don't want to see him order his signature martini so much as you'd like someone to throw one in his face and snap him out of it.
It's easy to see what the producers of the Bond movies are up to. They're fashioning a Bourne-again Bond - as in Bourne, Jason Bourne. The Matt Damon franchise, with its whiz-bang fights and chases and stoic central character, updated the action espionage flick far beyond the Bond series cliches. And it's not a bad thing to bring the iconic character a little up-to-date. But it's an entirely different thing to leave the suave, glitzy locale-hopping, gadget-reliant, shaken-not-stirred hero by the side of the road, which seems to be the point of these past two films. In "Casino Royale," it seemed like a fresh spin. Now it feels more like a wrong turn.
