A great film - but not memorable

Rating: 7/10 (16 November 2008)

Having seen Casino Royale and praised it greatly (although I have yet to give it an IMDb seal of approval), I knew that the direction of the franchise would change for the better. Daniel Craig played a different Bond, and Judi Dench played a different M - and overall, the tone and direction of the story was different from the overblown films preceding it (we all pretend not to remember Die Another Day, but hey, it exists).
The film picks up literally right where the last film ended - with the capture of Mr. White. Within less than ten seconds we already have an action sequence involving a car chase, and only five minutes or so after that, we have an even faster action sequence with a foot-chase, a cat and mouse thing comparable to the first chase sequence from Casino Royale.
The movie starts to trip from the first scene. Although it was probably done with good intention, Marc Forster, being the director, basically turned the movie into a Jason Bourne film - which is in some ways good, some ways bad, often more the latter than the former.
First, the good. Bond is vulnerable - we can see that physically as well as emotionally. He gets scratched up, he gets hurt, he winces in pain when he jumps balconies and hits metal. He is much more human than previous Bonds, even though Pierce Brosnan certainly set a precedent by dislocating his arm in the opening sequence of The World Is Not Enough. He also manages to show just how brutal Bond is when he kills. In fact it's almost a throwback to the older Bond movies with Connery and Moore, where they would often fight an assailant one-on-one, and struggle to defeat him.
The bad, however, seems to eclipse this. Forster's habit of shaky camera handling as a "device" tends to get very annoying. It worked out a few times in the first Bourne film, and it inflated his ego into thinking that it would work everywhere. The first chase scene was almost entirely shot on a shaky camera - something which *doesn't work* for car chases. When I can barely tell if Bond is doing the chasing or being chased, there is something wrong with the scene and there is almost definitely something wrong when I can barely tell what car is getting banged up where. When I saw Bond's passenger door fly off, I couldn't tell whether it was his Aston Martin or the pursuing enemies. Forster also makes the nasty mistake of assuming that you can eliminate all semblance of smooth transition from scene to scene from a movie and replace it with hasty wipe-cuts. If the movie had better cut sequences, it would have extended it by what, five minutes? Big deal.
Which brings me to my other points of contention. The story and plot are fantastic, once fully comprehended. A megalomaniac organization reminiscent of a shadow corporation like SPECTRE wishes to control the entire water supply of Bolivia. Great, but it's poorly executed. The story progresses too fast for the audience to take it in and simmer. In fact, some of the best scenes, including the one where Mathis and Bond talk upon the plane and where M talks to Bond in the hotel room in La Paz, were good for the simple reason that they gave the audience a chance to take in story details without exposition just thrown at the viewer. It's the difference between sipping champagne and then experiencing it's flavor and downing four shot glasses of vodka to become immediately drunk.
This isn't necessarily a bad quality in a movie. It is a bad quality for a Bond movie. There are certain elements that people come to watch a Bond movie for. One is Bond's charm, which Daniel Craig certainly could portray as he did in CR, but in QS he completely eschews it save for a single scene with Agent Strawberry Fields (seriously?), the desk operative in Bolivia tasked with arresting him. Even then, it was barely touched upon. I'm not talking about sexuality - we know he has plenty of that. But even his ability to simply cause someone to melt their barriers was conspicuously absent. Another very obvious element the movie missed out upon was Bond's ability to savor whatever he's in, regardless of his circumstances. We can forgive that in light of the seriousness of the story and his predicament, but we can't know whether the directors intended it to be that way or not.
The movie has a few gems. Rene Mathis, the French-Italian agent Bond (as it turns out, falsely) accuses of treachery in CR, is the emotional heart of this film. In some ways, he is what Bond is archetypal - a refined gentleman with special tastes and an uncanny ability to charm others. He brings out the best in Bond and confronts him about the fact that Vesper Lynd died to protect him, and that he needs to forgive her. Judi Dench's M is a much more cold, powerful character than the previous M's and serves as a driving point for part of the plot of the film. The officers seem to cynically refer to her as "Mom" and she certainly treats them like their children, but with hard love. Daniel Craig brings a lot of depth to Bond, for all his shortcomings, and gives him human failings as well as human strengths. Perhaps most pleasingly of all, Mathieu Amalric as the (main) villain, Dominic Greene, is perfect as a sort of sinister businessman with no ethical sense of entitlement and almost analogous to the villain from Tomorrow Never Dies, but with fewer stealth boats.
The film is certainly worth watching (given that you need to have a certain tolerance to an extremely shaky camera) and certainly worth the money and time.