Misdirected Bond

Rating: 6/10 (12 November 2008)

Hopefully, this latest Bond won't set the any trends for the future installments, which with Bond are sure to follow.
Quantum of Solace tries to be continue Casino Royal's darker and more serious Bond interpretation. But terrible directing and chaotic script will leave you hardly following the plot.
There are 2 major problems with this film: The first is the terrible directing and camera work in the action scenes. The chases and fights are all shot in extreme closeups, almost never taking a step back for a wide-angle shot which lets the viewers see what's going on. And to make things worse, the action scenes are hyper-edited, cutting frantically between shots from different angles. The result is disorienting, confusing, and headache inducing. It takes more than just stunts to create flowing, exciting action, and this movie demonstrates just how difficult it is to direct action sequences.
The second problem is the fast-paced, convoluted script - It's simply too hard to follow. The story jumps too fast from one dead body to the next, characters enter without introduction and are killed off soon after. Unanswered plot points are left dangling everywhere. It's quite a mess, more than once eliciting a "wha?!?" reaction from the audience. And to top this all, the ending is so completely disjointed from the rest of the film, it feels like the writers taped a scene from the next Bond movie to add some running time to this one.
All in all, it's a very flawed Bond.