Quantum of Solace (2008)

I don’t want to be “that guy,” someone who extrapolates a grandiose criticism from a very nitpicky observation, but Quantum of Solace is the only Bond film that doesn’t begin with the gun barrel sequence, which should be an immediate red flag that what we’re about to see is either not a Bond film or one that exists in a rough unfinished state, missing a few key components.  Obviously, Quantum of Solace is a case of the latter – an unfinished product with a puzzler for a plot and an apparent attempt to refuse to be the James Bond movie Casino Royale promised.

While pursuing the secret organization who killed his lover, James Bond (Daniel Craig) discovers that one of its members, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), is conspiring with a South American despot to stage a coup and dominate a key world resource.  Bond works to prevent this conspiracy, avenge his lover, and help Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko) find her own peace – all while M (Judi Dench) struggles to contain an increasingly renegade Bond.

First of all, the plot of Quantum of Solace is exceptionally thin; Bond encounters the main plot only by coincidence, and he’s only following suspicion of wrongdoing for the bulk of the film.  I much prefer either the classic “mission briefing” mode of storytelling for Bond, or the slowly unraveling grand conspiracy.  Quantum is neither, a mingle-mangle of setpieces that almost feel as though they’re out of order (Bond flies to the desert to uncover Greene’s plot, goes back to the city to not confront Greene, then travels back to the desert).

In a Bond film, those setpieces can be everything, with great action sequences even partially redeeming a bad Bond film.  For me, that’s honestly what sets Quantum of Solace a notch below Die Another Day – Die Another Day had that memorable duel sequence, a half-chase through a Cuban clinic, and an outlandish but still fun hovercraft fight.  Quantum’s action pieces begin promisingly enough, with a great car chase through Siena, but it quickly becomes apparent that director Marc Forster is not as deft with directing action as Martin Campbell was on Casino Royale.  Often Forster will cut away from the action at its most interesting, as when a plane stunt occurs largely behind a mountain.  It’s artistic editing that reminds us how good Forster was in Stranger Than Fiction but how out-of-place he seems in a big-budget franchise.

The willful cutting of the camera’s gaze away from the action is just one of the places where Quantum stubbornly refuses to be a Bond film, completely missing the memo from Casino Royale.  In Casino Royale, Martin Campbell and the crew showed us how to update Bond while staying true to the (let’s be honest here) formula of the franchise – disfigured villain, suave (super)hero, sultry siren with a curious name, big-stakes plot.  Casino Royale added in “psychological realism,” shook it up (never stirred), and turned out an invigorating fresh approach to Bond.  Quantum seems to have taken the lesson as “be as un-Bond as possible.”  Dominic Greene isn’t disfigured beyond his small stature, which is probably meant as a comment on the banality of evil, but it doesn’t work when the script asks him to become a physical threat to Bond.  Gemma Arterton’s turn as Agent Fields feels like a bad gag when she refuses to tell Bond her first name, which the credits reveal is “Strawberry” – it’s a wonderful gag with a wink toward outlandish predecessors like Pussy Galore and Xenia Onatopp, but the movie dangles it in front of us like a cat toy on a string.

The best material in Quantum, it seems, is elsewhere – off camera, in the credits, or nestled in the viewer’s imagination.  The saddest thing about the film is its unlived potential, glimmers of what the follow-up to Casino Royale should have been; there are disparate plot threads involving a Bond driven mad by revenge, Felix Leiter’s attempt to work against a corrupt CIA, M’s begrudging willingness to trust Bond, and the parallels between Bond and Camille’s quest for vengeance – but these are presented in mere outline form, painted with the broadest of strokes.  Any one of these could have made a compelling backbone to the second in a new era of James Bond, but crumpled together as they are, the whole ends up being so much less than the sum of its parts.

Let’s be fair – Quantum of Solace was damaged by the 2007-2008 Writers’ Strike.  Forster and Craig are on record as saying that they personally tuned up the screenplay between takes, and that almost certainly accounts for the lack of cohesion or semblance of narrative structure.  Essentially, it’s like taking a blacksmith to task for not being a computer engineer – to which I have to respond, however, that it would have been better to wait for Steve Jobs.  Quantum would have benefited immeasurably from a professional writer’s eye, and I would rather have waited for a true successor to Casino Royale.  What we get instead is a Godfather III, more epilogue than proper sequel.

Quantum of Solace fortunately ends with one of its best sequences, in which Bond finally confronts the double agent responsible for his lover’s death and (minor spoilers) steadfastly refuses to kill him.  He and M have a semi-touching conversation about revenge before she asks him to return to the agency.  “I never left,” he answers, trudging away alone in the snowfall.  If Casino Royale ended with the promise that James Bond truly was back, Quantum of Solace at least accounts for its own missteps in this moment by reassuring us that Bond hasn’t gone anywhere and is perhaps finally ready to inherit the mantle suggested by Casino Royale.

Of course, we know that’s what ended up happening.  Consider Quantum a speedbump on the road to Skyfall.

Quantum of Solace is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, and some sexual content.”  The violence isn’t quite bloody, but especially in the last sequence you can really feel some of the more visceral bits.  It’s not as intense as Casino Royale, though.  Aside from one brief encounter, Bond doesn’t sleep with the Bond girl, and any other sexual encounters are only mentioned, not shown, though there is an attempted sexual assault.

We’ve reached the end of a two-year journey through the Bond canon, but don’t hang up your tuxedos just yet – James Bond and The Cinema King will return with a special bonus feature on December 7, 2014!  (And you don’t have to wait until then to read a review of Skyfall – we did that ages ago.)