Poor

Rating: 5/10 (16 November 2008)

The second movie of the new Bond franchise, following the very successful Casino Royale. It's pretty clear that I'm not at all a Bond fan. I kind of like the modern Bonds, the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig ones, as mediocre action movies. That's all I see them as. I see the old ones as mildly amusing camp at best, completely inept Hitchcock rip-offs at worst. Casino Royale was a slightly above mediocre action movie. Quantum of Solace, on the other hand, is just a plain bad one. It's ineptly directed by a man who's never been close to an action picture before, and its editing is some of the worst I've ever seen. For the life of me, I could barely ever tell what was going on in the action sequences. I don't know if I like Craig as Bond, even in the last one. He's too brutish and nasty. He lacks the suaveness that is supposed to define Bond. There are a couple of things I did like about Quantum of Solace: 1) The theme song is the best one since GoldenEye. I'm a White Stripes fan, and very much liked Jack White's song. Alicia Keys' presence was unnecessary, however. 2) I like the Bond girl, Olga Kurylenko. Not only is she very hot, but I like that the women of the last two Bond movies had a little more substance than the objectified Bond girls of the past. 3) The bad guy, played by Mathieu Amalric: I never connected to his character in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, because he struck me as a sniveling scumbag. In Quantum of Solace, he plays a sniveling scumbag, so he fits the role perfectly.