Bland

Rating: 5/10 (19 November 2008)

QoS suffers in the wake of Casino Royale and Bourne, both of which are grander, grittier, more stylish and more exciting, even in their quieter moments. Craig's Bond is still great and somehow escapes without criticism, but it's the rest of the film that suffers under poor direction.
Despite the frequent, frenetically edited car, foot, boat, plane chases, I still felt that most of the action remained fairly bland and without any real threat. Forster aims for the style of the last film and attempts to draw life from the Bourne canon, but totally fails on creating one robust, easy to follow action scene. The action design just can't cut it - at times being downright ludicrous, and at others plain confusing. Mark Forster is a great character director, and should probably go back to that - or tried that here. That's probably why he was hired.
On the absence of threat, Bond doesn't really meet his match anywhere in this film (unlike our last episode) out-witting all of his opponents with ease. Just as we were starting to see Bond's human side, starting to gain a new interest in this character, he once again becomes invincible, and as we were beginning to find with some of the older Bond films, this is boring.
It's not that I didn't enjoy it just because it's different. Different is good. I don't care about the placement of the gun-barrel sequence. I don't care about the choice of opening song (Chris Cornell didn't make many people happy either at first). Shameless product placement? (Omega?) So what? Casino Royale was different, with it's brutal, bleeding Bond, a very atypical shower scene, the Parkour intro chase, the grainy noir pre-title sequence, the intelligently conceived title sequence that did away with dancing women. Hell! Bond even fell in love! How different can you get? In my option, what a brilliant film for it!
What I do care about is whether the film engages. Whether is looks competent, whether the plot is competently put together. This film didn't impress in any of these categories. You know you're in trouble when the characters turn up and start trying to explain the plot to each other. That's when you know that some bigwig board has decided to make the movie 'accessible'. Mistake. Though it might have been better if the plot was worth discussing.
Look, I've had my moments of dimness, but I'm usually able to follow most films, some requiring a little more concentration than others - you too? Great. So I'm not ashamed to say that I had trouble following the plot of QoS, not because it was too smart, but because a) the plot was so poorly constructed and chosen, that I b) just ended up just not caring enough to bother following it. My brain switched off, prioritising sleep over watching yet another chase sequence with the same outcome...
Sorry to be a party pooper, but come on. Lets be honest...