As someone who truly loves movies, there’s no worse feeling than going to see a movie you’ve been anticipating for months only to have it suck. That’s the way I felt after seeing Quantum of Solace in theaters last November. After the absolute triumph of Casino Royale and a truly kick-ass series of trailers forQoS, all I had was a feeling equal parts anger and sadness when I left the theater. CR was one of 2006’s best films and was a huge accomplishment because it rebooted the Bond franchise after Brosnan’s horrendous final foray with the character. Daniel Craig showed us a new James Bond, one who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty with vicious fight scenes, but also had that debonair coolness that defines Bond.
I have since seen CR numerous times and a few weeks before QoS’s DVD release, we started getting those kick-ass trailers again on TV. That, coupled with having to be laying down all the time after throwing out my back again, led me to give QoS another shot, and luckily, it was not as bad as I originally said. Still, it is not a good movie by any means, and it has problems at pretty much every level of it’s production.
Let’s start with the direction, which I consider to be one of the film’s biggest problems. Marc Forrester seems to be doing his best Paul Greengrass impression, going with a lot of quick cuts and a shaky cam approach. The problem is that this is Greengrass style, and no matter what is going on, he is always in control of the film. Forrester’s attempt is a shaky mess. The film’s opening car chase is a perfect example. This should be the perfect opening to a Bond film. Great action and great practical effects would really set the mood for the follow up to CR, but that’s not what we get. We do get amazing practical effects, but the camera is so shaky and the cuts are so quick that it is impossible to tell what is going on. I was convinced that Bond drove off a cliff, only to find out in the next cut it was the other car and Bond was fine. This problem isn’t limited to large scale action pieces. In the first hand-to-hand fight (something that was executed perfectly multiple times in Craig’s first Bond endeavor), Forrester tries to imitate a Bourne fight scene. Fine; those are awesome. Get close enough that the audience feels involved, but far enough away that you can see the whole fight. This fight scene is shot way to close with way too many cuts. I mean, cutting in the middle of punch? What is this, WWE wrestling? I could go on and on about the way the film looks, but I’m assume you’ve got the idea by now. Too shaky, too choppy. Moving on.
The next biggest problem for me is the plot. This movie picks up an hour or two after CR ends, so there should be some connectedness to that movie, especially given the massive event that occurs in the final few minutes, but I’ll get into that issue in depth in a few minutes. The best way to describe QoS’s plot is to say that it is both convoluted and underdeveloped. This may seem contradictory at first glance, but allow me to defend my position. The information that is delivered to the audience about what is going on is given sporadically and never fully explained at that moment. The plot seems to string the audience along from small point to small point, keeping them in the dark while at the same time giving them massive amounts of information. The problems is that so much information is coming from so many different places, the audience doesn’t know how to process it all and by the time they do, there’s more information coming in. The plot is underdeveloped because by the time the audience gets the final reveal, the villain’s master plan, they’re left saying “Really? That’s it?”. Even if someone could convince me that it’s an impressive plan, we are never given a chance to see the large scale ramifications of the plan. The movie seems to sacrifice story telling for action set pieces. This movie is about 40 minutes shorter than its predecessor, but has more action scenes. What does it say about your action when a movie that focuses around a poker game has better action than your movie? Also, I thought that the point of rebooting the Bond franchise was to get away from the ridiculousness of the Brosnan films. CR did this. It had a foot chase (one of the best chase scenes of all time, might I add), an unconventional car chase (both the protagonist and antagonist of the chase are in the same car), and a lot of hand to hand fighting. All awesome action sequences that are at least plausible enough in the real world. What does QoS us? A poorly shot car chase, a boat chase (I’m sorry, but boat chases aren’t cool. Just watchFace/Off for proof), an airplane chase (!), and someone other overdone action sequences.
So far, we’ve got a bad plot that’s shot poorly, but what about the characters? Well, we’ve got Craig returning as Bond, and he was perfect as Bond in CR, so of course he’s great in this one. Too bad that’s not true. It’s not Craig’s fault either. I already said how great he was as Bond previously, so this is another problem that falls at Forrester’s feet. Bond is supposed to be cool and deadly, and he does the latter with an blank face (more on this in the next section), but he is certainly not cool in this movie. I mean, look at that haircut. How can he be the debonair ladies man when Judi Dench has a cooler haircut. None of the other characters are special either. Olga Kurylenko is completely vanilla as the Bond girl, mainly because of the writing, but she wasn’t exactly Meryl Streep either. I don’t know who plays Dominic Greene, the film’s “villain”, but he was such garbage I refuse to learn his name. Greene is such a horrible villain that I’m not even sure he deserves the title. He’s about 5’7”, French, and he screams like a girl everytime he swings an ax. The only character who seemed to be bringing something to the table was the criminally underused Strawberry Fields, who should have been the Bond girl. Aside from all of the characters being poorly written, they had nothing but horrible dialogue to work with. One of the characters dying words to Bond are “Forgive her, James. Forgive yourself.” Hey, Craig, does your nose hurt, because that dialogue was right on it? Another one of my favorites is Kurylenko’s line to Bond: “I wish I could set you free, but your prison is in there.” She’s touching his face at the time.
Despite all of the flaws I have listed thus far, I have saved what I consider to be the film’s biggest missed opportunity and what makes it truly fail for last, but to do so, I have to go into spoilers for CR, so here we go. At the end of CR, Bond quits his job at MI:6 because he has fallen in love with Treasury worker Vesper Lynd. They run off to Italy where it looks like they are going to live happily ever after. That is until Vesper betrays Bond, gives the Treasury’s money to the mysterious Mr. White, and then drowns herself. It seems she was a bad guy after all until Bond gets a posthumous text telling him to find Mr. White. Before going after him, Bond delivers one of the most tragic lines in the character’s history, as he tells M that “The bitch is dead.” CR then ends with Bond shooting Mr. White in the leg and getting ready to interrogate him. As an audience, we see that Bond truly loves Vesper and that she loves him. The scenes between them in CR are truly emotional and they work so well because we see Bond at his most elemental or as Vesper says “without his armor.” With her dead, we should get a darker Bond, one who cares about revenge and will do whatever it takes to reach that goal. We should see him broken and alone, doing things that Bond has never done before. This was something that was promised to me in the trailer. It showed Bond crying. Where was that in the film? I would have loved nothing more than to have a shot of Bond sobbing in the bathroom or having an uncontrollable outburst of anger, but we get nothing. Not one tear shed. We are shown that Bond is in mourning through a series of blank faces. In one scene, he drinks a lot while looking at a picture of Vesper. Now, I could buy the blank face approach when he’s around other people, because his “armor” is on, but when he’s alone, he should at least show some emotion. There are multiple scenes that were ripe to show how messed up Bond is, and yet we are given nothing. The reason that Takenworked is because there was the emotion behind all of Neeson’s violence, where we get none of that with Craig. Without going into QoS spoilers, the resolution to the Vesper story arc gives us a glimpse of what should be, but it is not enough and done so poorly that we are left unfulfilled.
The Bond we see in CR is not the same Bond we see in QoS, and I don’t mean that in a metaphorical way. It is two different views on the same character, except one of them is good and one of them as bad. They are presented to us as the same, which is why we know that somethings wrong we just can’t put our finger on it. In conclusion, Quantum of Solace’s biggest flaw is that it fails to give Casino Royale the proper send-off it deserved.
UPDATE: It’s been brought to my attention that the director’s name is misspelled. He doesn’t deserve a correction.
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