Anger Management

Rating: 7/10 (10 December 2008)

The epitome of gadget flashing, women seducing, bad guy busting masculinity is back, in Marc Forster's latest installment in the 007 saga. But this time it's different. Daniel Craig returns as James Bond (and we can expect him in at least three more) in the first ever sequel to a previous Bond film. He is still mentally reeling from the loss of his love who died in a death worthy of a Bond film as she drowned in an elevator as a building collapsed into the sea at the end of Casino Royale. And it shows. In the darkest, deepest, and most personal (and most expensive) James Bond film in history, we get an insight into a battered and tormented 007; and get taken on a journey that bring him across the globe as a rogue agent looking to avenge Vesper's death and while stopping the world from ending once again.
In this film, Bond's foe is the organization QUANTUM and 'environmentalist' Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) who plays the part of man who is working with the CIA to stage a coup in Bolivia to restore its previous dictator in effort to gain control of a plot of land. Through this story line, Forster and the producers (Barbara Broccoli, Callum McDougall, and Brian Miller) bring Bond into a presently pertinent political battle, to the lengths of which Bond has never done before. We are introduced to a CIA that backs this genocide in hopes of obtaining oil. We see a Bolivian government privatizing the country's water, and in essence killing its own country in favor of big business. These are issues that cause this film to be more reflexive than the normal Bond films. It is not a happy-go-lucky romp like we got too used to in the hair mouse Brosnan era, but rather a gritty look at how does one deal with revenge, and how can that control our lives.
Craig seems to be tipping off of the deep end right from the start. He kills more people and more brutally than any Bond before him. We see this right from the get-go when we see him chase an MI6 mole down and end his life in an acrobatic finale which had them flying off rafters and through plate glass, to the subsequent scene in an apartment when he slices and kills a would be assassin for his beautiful counterpart Camille (played by the lovely Olga Kurylenko), to the end of the film where he sends Greene off into the dessert with a gunshot wound and a canister of oil to serve as his own little cyanide pill. M (played by a film saving, stone cold Judy Dench) even attempts to stop her prodigy child by stripping him of everything and attempting to bring him into custody. Bond, being the tunnel-visioned rogue that he is, escapes custody, and confronts M again, and it is in this moment that we understand what the film is really trying to tell us. M lets him go, but expresses that she can not and will not help him. We see that there are some things that can not be completed within the system. The world and people who control it are so corrupt at every level (remember the slimy CIA and the traitor in MI6) that to get true justice (vengeance and peace) it must be done alone, and with the world biting at your heels. Dark Knight anyone? The tormented hero is not something that is new to us. Perhaps a sign of the changing layman, who desires a hero not from the fables of yesterday, but from the minds of a today. Someone who could fit in a Bush/Darfur/Global Warming age, and who would be willing to go against the untouchable powers that be, in pursuit of justice.
The Bond girls in this film are different too. The cold Camille parts with 007 in the end of the film with not more than a kiss; which seems more like a peck of release, than of one stemming from any sexual tension at all. The only love making we see in the film at all is when Bond beds Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton) in an action that seemed coldly doomed from when they first met earlier that day. Subsequently, the completely innocent Fields ends up drowned in oil (in respectful homage to Goldfinger) and stifles any fun or lighthearted sexuality that we may have thought may have been able to slip in. Quantum brings sex and violence into one for Bond. Both are primary drives for him, and when the most powerful sexual pull of his life (Vesper) is killed off, Bond swings to the other side of the see-saw and is motivated and driven by violence and aggression.
Quantum of Solace doesn't bring the smoothness and comfort that we come to expect from Bonds, but maybe it's not supposed to. Maybe this is the grittier side of Bond that will make him real from now on. He will probably slide somewhat back into his suave and free-flowing ways of before, but now he's a real man. A man who can be affected and is driven by the evils of a modern era. A man who is no longer a superhero of the past, but a real live hero who can change things today.