by Rob Gonsalves
The Bold marks are the author's own.Quantum of Solace
"What's the point?"
The best parts of "Quantum of Solace," the new James Bond film, are the stylized-as-usual opening credits, which promise a lush and explosive evening, and the familiar gun-barrel bit with the classic 007 theme at the end.
These are the only parts that feel like a James Bond film. The rest is filler, which means the entire actual movie is filler. It is incomprehensible, blandly motivated, and flat-out dull. I’m one of those moviegoers who don’t have a great emotional stake in 007 but believe that if a Bond flick isn’t going to be awesomely ridiculous or ridiculously awesome, there’s little point to it.
The series had in recent years gotten bloated and decadent, though that was more a reflection on the weak scripts than on the traditional Bond style. So, with 2006’s Casino Royale and now Quantum of Solace, which is more like Casino Royale Vol. 2, we get a grim, stripped-down Bond (Daniel Craig). As many have pointed out, the Bond series has rebooted by imitating one of its own imitators, the Bourne series with Matt Damon. Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the escapism, the ludicrous plots, the stunts that prompt gasps and laughter? Recasting Bond as a gritty football hooligan in a suit is like performing Wagner with a symphony of kazoos.
This Bond kills assassins by stabbing them in the leg, then shuffling away with a scowl; Sean Connery was no less brutal, but somehow added suavity and humor to the violence. It doesn’t help that the carnage’s orchestrator is hack director Marc Forster, who skips from genre to genre (Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction, The Kite Runner) without offering any particular point of view. Here, Forster splinters the action into so many unreadable shards. When I don’t care about what’s happening, that’s one thing. When I can’t see what’s happening, that’s another thing. When I don’t care that I can’t see what’s happening, that’s movie death.
Bond’s mission here is to crack the terrorist organization Quantum and avenge the previous Bond girl (Eva Green) who died in Casino Royale. Sounds simple, but the Bond movies aren’t happy unless they complicate things unnecessarily, so there are double-crosses and globe-hopping, all of which plays as padding. In other Bond movies, we at least had absurd set pieces or eye candy to pass the time. But the Bond girls have gotten duller along with their surroundings, as have their names (“Strawberry Fields” is the best the writers can come up with here). And who doesn’t miss those glorious Ken Adam sets, instead of the grunting fisticuffs played out in squalid hotel rooms that we get here?
Despite its promisingly oblique title, Quantum of Solace is all on the surface, and those who honk on about Bond’s complex emotional progress in this movie are delusional; Daniel Craig is a stiff in a suit here, and it occurred to me that, between these new straight-faced 007 films and anguished epics like The Dark Knight and the upcoming Watchmen, fanboys increasingly prefer their thrills somber and “realistic.” A fanciful throwback like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with its much-derided nuke-the-fridge gag, doesn’t fit well in this clenched new environment, and neither would the old James Bond.
But if "Quantum of Solace" refuses to offer style, vision, or excitement, why is it there? Why, other than a big paycheck for Columbia and MGM every few years and a regular fix for 007 die-hards, is this series still going?
