Big Disappointment after "Royale"

Rating: 1/10 (17 November 2008)

This has been a year of huge disappointments for me at the movies. "Dark Knight" depressed me, "Crystal Skull" made me want to knife George Lucas, "Mamma Mia" to poke out my eardrums... And the dozen previews before this one made me want to stop going to the theater at all.
The director and editor of "Quantum" obviously had no idea what makes an action sequence work, what pace is, how to tell a story, or how to make an audience care what happened to these characters. Shots during the action fly by so fast you have no idea what's going on or even where characters are in relation to each other in each scene. However the exposition all drags by so slowly that you lose interest in even trying to untangle the plot. Not that the plot itself is so interesting. Far removed from the careful character work and set-up of "Casino Royale", "Quantum" is perfunctory and Bourne-by-the-numbers. It could just as easily have been Craig's last Bond; his "View to a Kill" or "Die Another Day", the one that kills off his slice of the franchise and makes the audience want to see someone else take over.
The worst offense for me, speaking as a fan who has loved almost all the previous Bonds, is that "Quantum" is so totally lacking in any sense of fun. This relaunched Bond doesn't enjoy what he's doing, as others before him have, and doesn't seem likely to grow into a man who will. He has no rapport with the other characters, least of all M or the superdull villain, and his motivation to hop from location to location -revenge - is so one-note that I started to miss the complexity of Roger Moore's later work.
If nothing else, "Quantum" should be huge selling point for new Blu-Ray players; I don't doubt it will drive people into stores to buy the newly re-released Bond collection so they can remind themselves what made this series so fantastic in the first place.