He’s back. Daniel Craig allays any fear that he was just a one-Martini Bond, with this, his second 007 adventure, the perplexingly named Quantum of Solace.
I’ve got to admit that this didn’t excite me as much as Casino Royale and the villain is especially underpowered. But Craig personally has the chops, as they say in Hollywood. He’s made the part his own, every inch the coolly ruthless agent-cum-killer, nursing a broken heart and coldly suppressed rage. If the Savile Row suit with the Beretta shoulder holster fits, wear it. And he’s wearing it.
This is a crash-bang Bond, high on action, low on quips, long on location glamour, short on product placement.
Under the direction of Marc Forster, the movie ladles out the adrenalin in a string of deafening episodes: car chases, plane wrecks, motor boat collisions. If it’s got an engine, and runs on fuel, and can crash into another similarly powered vehicle, with Bond at the wheel, and preferably with a delicious female companion in the passenger seat — well, it goes in the movie.
There are plenty of references to other Bond moments. A horribly dangerous skydive recalls The Spy Who Loved Me. A pile-up in Haiti that spills a macabre lorryload of coffins recalls the voodoo creepiness of Live and Let Die. And, most outrageously of all, the grotesque daubing of a female corpse brings back Goldfinger — though Sean Connery got an awful lot more mileage out of that sort of thing.
As in Casino Royale, the famous John Barry theme tune is saved up until the end; a baffling, decision, I always think, not to use this thrilling music at the beginning of the film.
Bond has hardly got his 007 spurs, when he’s infuriating M, Judi Dench, with his insolence and insubordination. Out in the field, he’s whacking enemy agents in short, sharp, bone-cracking bursts of violence when he should be bringing them in for questioning.
In theory, he is out to nail a sinister international business type: Dominic Greene, played by French star Mathieu Amalric, who under a spurious ecological cover plans to buy up swaths of South American desert and a portfolio of Latin American governments to control the water supply of an entire continent. As Greene, Amalric has the maddest eyes, creepiest leer, and dodgiest teeth imaginable.
Clearly, Bond has to take this fellow down. But he also wants to track down the man who took his beloved Vesper away from him in the previous movie: he is pathologically seeking payback, and to the fury of his superiors, this is getting personal. But it hasn’t stopped him cultivating female company in the traditional, fantastically supercilious manner. His companions are as demurely submissive as ever. Olga Kurylenko plays Camille, a mysterious, smoldering figure, out to wreak vengeance on the corrupt Bolivian dictators who killed her family.
Britain’s Gemma Arterton plays Agent Fields; she greets 007 wearing a trenchcoat with apparently little underneath, like some sort of MI6 strippogram. And she is the recipient of his ardor in the luxury hotel suite — that quintessential Bond habitat. This movie is, in fact, a reminder of how vital hotels are in Bond films, providing the essential narrative grammar: the checking in, the fight with the stranger in the room, the messages left at reception, the luxury cars lovingly photographed outside.
I was disappointed there was so little dialogue, flirtation or characterization in this Bond: Forster and his writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade clearly thought this sort of sissy nonsense has to be cut out in favor of explosions. Well, perhaps that is what Bond fans want (not this Bond fan, though). But I was also baffled that relatively little was made of the deliciously villainous Amalric: especially the final encounter.
But set against this is the cool, cruel presence of Craig — his lips perpetually semi-pursed, as if savoring some new nastiness his opponents intend to dish out to him, and the nastiness he intends to dish out in return. This film, unlike the last, doesn’t show him in his powder-blue swimming trunks (the least heterosexual image in 007 history), but it’s a very physical performance. Quantum of Solace isn’t as good as Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig’s Bond debut has been toned down in favor of conventional action. But the man himself powers this movie; he carries the film: it’s an indefinably difficult task for an actor. Craig measures up.
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