A promising direction for the franchise; a rubbish director for the movie

Rating: 4/10 (11 November 2008)

I wouldn't call myself a crazy fan of the Bond movies; I only own about three or four on DVD, all of them from the Connery era. I prefer the colder and murkier Fleming novels, which is perhaps why I like Daniel Craig as Bond. Pierce Brosnan was good fun but he was Connery Lite; Timothy Dalton was a good actor who behaved as though he was in a different film to everyone else; and with the Roger Moore movies, you might as well have been watching something like "Smokey and the Bandit".
So a darker, more tortured Bond is a good idea, I think, and Daniel Craig can certainly do tortured. With his boxer's face and deadpan delivery, he is just the guy to present a more realistic and three-dimensional version of the character. Strange, then, that it was partly on his recommendation that Marc Forster was hired to direct this movie.
Forster and his editor cut the entire film like one huge action sequence. He said somewhere how he felt that "Casino Royale" felt "too long" and that he wanted this film to be zippier. Job done, Mr. Forster. It goes by so fast you'll barely notice it. As the final titles rolled, I turned to my wife and said "Wasn't there supposed to be a story?" There is a story, at least on paper. Despite Forster's impatience with the thought of filming performances by actors, Mathieu Amalric manages to register his presence on screen as a memorably two-faced Bond villain, a scheming suit with the appearance of a scruffy, hip, eco-millionaire. The fast cutting means that the action sequences only impress - you are dazzled by them, but there is no real drama or suspense because when the cutting is this fast, there is no time to focus on what's happening to people: this Bond can jump from house to house like a lemur and take down a lift full of trained MI5 agents in a blur of kicks and punches without even breaking a sweat. I, for one, would love to see Bond chase someone in one long take, something like the celebrated chase sequence in "French Connection II" in which an out-of-condition Gene Hackman runs...and runs...and runs...after the almost oblivious Fernando Rey, getting more and more out of breath.
The story was apparently written on the fly, while shooting the previous movie, and it feels like it. The villain's lair catches fire after a single stray bullet punctures a gas line; haven't these supervillains ever heard of health and safety procedures??? For all the talk about Bond going "inward" and the franchise taking a bold new direction, this is one of the flimsiest and least involving Bond movies I have ever seen; at least the Moore movies had a sense of absurd humour. "Casino Royale" was the first Bond movie that made me actually care about Bond. "Quantum of Solace", on the other hand, is deeply frustrating: the producers, and I think Craig, want it to be more realistic but the director doesn't pause for long enough to reality to catch a breath. The result is a grim and uninvolving cartoon.
I suggest that next time, the Bond people should get a proper screenwriter to sit down and write a proper script, and then they should replace Marc Forster with a director who is not going to think that he's above all this Bond movie nonsense and that the characters aren't worth taking seriously.