Both shaken and stirred

Rating: 7/10 (16 November 2008)

People tend to agree that the "new" James Bond, Daniel Craig, is awesome--and really new. Ian Fleming's original Bond was "cruelly handsome." Craig's got the cruel part, but looks take second place to muscle. He isn't pretty and he isn't stylish except insofar as a man who's lean and hard looks well in a good suit. Though he's brisk and then some--faster than a speeding bullet--he's rather sullen. His face is gnarly, able to regenerate scar tissue with stunning rapidity but little suited to the registering of human emotion. If he strains a bit he can just manage a snarl. Craig is above all a tougher, more pared-down Bond, whose finesse comes not in his skill at seducing a woman or pouring a cocktail but in the capacity to survive any physical challenge. This second Bond film with Craig shows his version can still be fun, and his adventures, amazingly, given all that's been hacked off, still contain some of the glamorous, extravagant feel of the earlier films and of Fleming's silly, superficial, but irresistibly entertaining novels. But the franchise (this is said to be Bond film no. 22) has been updated and reconceived for our times.
Not only Bond, but the other trappings of the books and previous films have been rethought. "M" is now a woman--Judy Dench, solid, crisp, understated, and curiously protective. When others want to derail Bond for killing all the suspects in a case, she sees to it that he's allowed to continue. There are beautiful babes, but not so many and not for so long. There's futuristic gadgetry. But it's more plausible, and less individual. No exploding cigarette lighters or weapon-emitting vehicles with ejection seats; just the high-tech essentials of our day--telephones cued in with computers and data systems. And some excesses: at one point Bond intercepts a dozen bad guys holding a conference call using little nodules in their ears as they sit in the audience of an ultra-modern and plenty-loud production of 'Tosca' in Bregenz, Austria. Bond suggests they try another venue. Indeed they might. But Bond himself makes do with nothing but a pistol and his own indestructible body.
Unlike Jason Bourne, 'Quantum's' Bond his no mystery to solve, just a score to settle. There's no self-questioning, just a grudge.
Unfortunately, there's no finesse. Yes, Bond has an elaborately prepared cocktail, but it's more complicated than fun, no "shaken, not stirred" (a formula mocked by Craig's Bond in his first outing). There's no Fleming fascination with chic brand names. Bond dons evening clothes and the good suits--only slightly bulgy from the muscles. He drives a Bondian Astin Martin during the ridiculously violent and rapid chase along the Italian Riviera that opens the movie, but though there may be some pleasure in seeing extremely expensive European sports cars battered and colliding like toy bumper cars, there's no elegance in it. The poor Astin gets its door torn off, and looks a wreck all the way through the scene.
Bond himself is like that car. He's thrown about, and in several sequences jumps around on buildings as if practicing the French sport of parkour, which has been defined as "an activity with the aim of moving from one point to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body." That, in a nutshell, is Daniel Craig as 007. Like Matt Damon's Jason Bourne, his body is his main weapon. Bond's taken away by three MI6 men--or four, I didn't have time to see-- under orders from "M," and taken into an elevator. "M" probably knows this will happen: five seconds after the elevator doors close behind them the would-be guards are all on the floor unconscious, only Bond left standing. We can't even see how he did it; so what? It was inevitable.
'Quantum' may offer 'Solace,' but it's short not only on elegance but wit. There's little humor and the bad guys lack Fleming's bizarre flourishes. There's a standard-issue South American dictator waiting to take over again. There's a fake eco-sensitive entrepreneur named Greene (Matthieu Amalric), who will strike a bargain with anybody, just like an actual global arms dealer. He corners the water supply to help the general take over the country: it's all too plausible. True to life too, the statement that the Americans don't matter much any more. True to the film's seriousness, the salt-and-pepper CIA duo, with James Wright as the shrewder of the two, Felix Leiter, who becomes Bond's ally, may seem destined to be buffoons, but they get the straight treatment.
You can't see all this as a dumbing down. Fleming's books were clever and entertaining, but hardly what you could call brain twisters. It's a simplification, a toughing up. And a speeding up--the latter adjusted to suit the 21st-century TV generations accustomed to five images a second, to brain-damaging ADD-engendering, Ritalin-requiring, stimulus-hungry young boy's minds. The opening sequence, with its unmotivated, unexplained, pointless, sense-jarring car clashes and spins and falls, is designed just for them, to say: don't worry. We know you're watching, and we're going to give you what you want. But though large parts of the world are growing fatter and softer, athletes have grown tougher and faster, and all spectators know that, so the Sixties Bond now seems effete, and he had to be reconditioned to meet the demands of Extreme Sports and the fantasy quotient of the digital age.
Is this a good movie? It's an entertainment, just like all the other Bond pictures, and though we can sigh the lack of the old charm, this lean and mean model holds its own quite well. If only there were more conversation. And if only it would relax a bit more.