Responding to the bloat of
films like Die Another Day, 2006's Casino Royale pared the James Bond film
franchise down to its base elements. Then it just kept paring until much of the
mythos established by the 20 Bond movies before it had been discarded as well,
leaving only a thrillingly straightforward adventure movie of blunt violence,
high stakes, and human casualties. The film found the ideal back-to-basics
leading man in Daniel Craig, who played Bond as a man more brutal than dashing
and more prone to brood than smirk.
The problem with bucking
formula is that you can only do it once before the new order itself becomes a
formula. Reprising every element that made Casino interesting—particularly
a tone set by its star's unsmiling face—Quantum Of Solace lacks the shock of the
new. It also has trouble sustaining the appeal of the old. The action sequences
vary wildly in quality, from a thrilling opening in Siena, Italy to a muddled
confrontation staged against an avant-garde production of Tosca to a finale that's
somewhere between, and which lasts several quantums of forever.
Yet it still feels like
the right Bond for the time. Picking up shortly after Casino Royale, Quantum quickly establishes that
Bond and M (Judi Dench, excellent again) play for global stakes against
subterranean players. Suggesting that the new series will have a greater
commitment to overarching story than in the past, the film spins elements from Royale into a
convoluted plot that takes Craig's Bond from Europe to Haiti to Mexico in
pursuit of a villain (Mathieu Amalric) posing as an eco-friendly entrepreneur.
Olga Kurylenko plays a sidekick who only barely qualifies as a love interest,
in part because her focus on revenge is almost as single-minded as Bond's.
Director Marc Forster,
better known for dramas like Monster's Ball and Stranger Than
Fiction
than for action movies, keeps things focused and moving forward. The film
feels, to use a phrase one character applies to Bond, "horribly efficient":
It's dark and exciting, but with little breathing room. Where Casino went the Batman Begins route, figuring out what makes
an iconic 20th-century character work and retrofitting him for 21st-century
relevance, Forster fails to make Bond's Dark Knight by deepening the themes
and expanding the scale. Instead, Quantum is content merely to be the second episode
in what's shaping up to be a viable series, good enough but disappointing for
those expecting greatness.