Quantum of Solace
Review by Steven D. Greydanus | posted 11/14/2008
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The 2006 smash hit Casino Royale was James Bond's Batman Begins, a darkly masterful, psychologically layered origin story that threw to the winds the tongue-in-cheek camp stylings of earlier franchise installments and completely rethought its iconic but flawed hero and his world from the ground up, taking seriously the rough edges that had previously been papered over with a wink.
If the unconventional title Quantum of Solace, more redolent of "Star Trek" cerebralism than the id-driven 007 world, held out any hope that the much-anticipated follow-up would be in any way analogous to The Dark Knight—that is, an even more ambitious crucible for the newly minted hero, a soul-searching exploration of chaos and order in a world of escalation, failure and incalculable exigencies—well, no such luck.
Where Casino Royale was the longest Bond movie ever, Quantum of Solace is the shortest ever—and the title track by Jack White and Alicia Keyes bearing the distinctly Bondesque title "Another Way to Die," is one of the most abrasive and unpleasant ever. (Also, as noted by CT Movies critic and inveterate list-maker Peter Chattaway, Casino director Martin Campbell was the oldest director ever of a Bond film, while Quantum director Marc Forster is the youngest.)
Daniel Craig as James Bond
The result may not be the least consequential Bond flick ever, but it has no pretensions of topping or even rivaling Casino's landmark contribution to the Bond mythos. Compared to Casino, Quantum is unquestionably a disappointment, a coda to its formidable predecessor. Compared to Bond films for the last twenty years or so, Quantum is … a decent post-Bourne action thriller, I guess. Ferocious car chases, rooftop pursuits, brutal combat sequences, elegantly choreographed stunts, a parade of exotic locations … Quantum does all this, with credible panache. Just don't expect to care like you did in Casino.
Quantum does extend Casino's cold, cynical tone as Bond finds himself adrift in a trust-no-one world of military intelligence blind spots, ignorance and conflicts of interest. There is some attempt to develop a post-9/11 context for Bond's adventures in the sinister secret organization Quantum, whose absolute secrecy and seemingly all-powerful reach are all the more implausible precisely because of the realism of MI-6's fallibility.
Daniel Craig is still the quintessential James Bond, cold, ruthless and somehow lacking in complete humanity. "A blunt instrument," M (Judi Dench) called him in Casino, and villainous Mr. Greene (Mathieu Amalric of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) of Quantum, ostensibly an environmentalist–philanthropist, contemptuously describes both Bond and the heroine du jour as "damaged goods."
The latter is Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a reckless, fragile femme fatale among equally fatales hommes, a woman who, like Quantum's Bond, is driven by revenge. In one significant way, Camille might be among the most interesting Bond Girls, precisely because she might be, in a sense, the only Bond Girl who isn't.
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