Bond Reborn as 'Bourne' Falls Flat

Rating: 3/10 (2 December 2008)

Attention! Attention 'Quantum of Solace' screenwriters and director! James Bond is a worldly, charismatic, English gentleman spy who's in to his job and uses his wits to win hearts and defeat enemies. Jason Bourne is a regretful American man-boy of an assassin moping his way from one violent confrontation to another in search of a solution to his identity crisis and squishing anyone who tries to stop him.
Two entirely different characters.
Sure, it's always a good time at the movies to see your hero best one or more faceless goons by out-driving or out-fighting them a la the 'Bourne' series. And the second installment of the new James Bond franchise starring Daniel Craig certainly delivers in this department. Craig, too, is a fantastic choice for a new, Steve McQueen-esquire no-nonsense less-cute Bond, and the film does not suffer for lack of an appealing central character.
What 'Quantum of Solace' does suffer from, however, will keep you suffering throughout the film.
'Quantum,' in part, is a continuation of the story told in 'Casino Royale,' about some freakily cabal of rich jerks who were squeezing a British Secret Service Agent by ransoming her boyfriend and causing her to seduce Bond, betray him and ultimately kill herself over the whole affair. Sad, scary and personal. At one point in this previous film, Craig's Bond sits with her character in the shower as she tries to shake off an evening's hideous violence. It was a clean break from the impenetrably cool Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan's Bond-as-bimbo. The highly personal aspects of the 'Royale' movie provided a motor that drove its story and made you care who was gaming whom in a high stakes tale of cards, collusion and counter-espionage.
Nice little movie.
'Quantum,' by contrast, is as cool and impersonal a film as could be made. It unceremoniously drops us into the middle of some car-chase in Italy and never quite lets us catch up. Apparently, Bond is out to root out the aforementioned jerks and hopefully avenge the death of the aforementioned agent. He comes across some weird French fat-cat out to control world water markets or something and feed some girl to the wolves in the process. The girl, Olga Kurylenko's "Camille," is on a revenge quest herself and she and Bond team up a la pretty much every Bond flick you've ever seen. Who is Camille? What is she about? What drives her? Beyond a brief soliloquy laying out her motivations, we're given nothing to work with. Camille is like a Cliff's-notes version of a role. Melina, the girl-out-for-revenge character in 1981's 'For Your Eyes Only,' played gorgeously by Carol Bouquet, had a sensibility and an origin and we understood her. Her character had an arc in the film, if a small one. Camille is hot, but we never get to know her and end up as invested in her plight as we would the cover girl for next month's Maxim.
Bond proceeds to uncover a pack of rich weirdos belonging to the criminal ring for which the film is named. What are they up to exactly? It's hard to tell because mainly, we get one mindless, pounding action sequence after another, causing each to come off as more meaningless and forced than the last.
Bond annihilates everyone in his path in scenes that seem matched shot-for-shot from the Bourne films. But traditionally, it's Bond's wits, not his physique that saves the day. When Connery's or Moore's Bond was having their clock cleaned by a more physically imposing henchman, they'd typically devise some clever means of turning their foe's advantage against him. Think Oddjob from 'Goldfinger' being electrocuted by reaching for the metal-brimmed hat he uses to wing people to death. It would have been possible to update the Bond character whilst retaining his brains-over-brawn M.O., but again, this new 007 franchise seems to think Jason Bourne is the new standard. The older films knew there's always a bigger bad-ass.
And as much as the violence is ramped up in 'Quantum,' the sex is dialed way down. Watching Bond spar with and seduce his leading ladies is half the fun of the 007 films but the ravenously beautiful Camille gets not even a flirt! Bond's one (yes, ONE) sexual conquest in 'Quantum' is essentially an office romance. Watching this 40-something Bond seduce a 20-something colleague with a non-committal one-line lame-o ploy free of humor, joy, or even innuendo was dopey, false, and vaguely incestuous. As dispatched by Judy Dench's new, motherly 'M' to assist Bond, the girl came off as his sister and their tryst as wholly perfunctory. As Bond's love-life goes, this new franchise, again, takes its cues from the Bourne series: joyless romances with colleagues -- Julia Stiles's Nicky -- and a wary but caring mother figure in the form of a superior officer -- Joan Allen's Pamela Landy. The fun and the life of Bond films is completely cut out of the 'Quantum' offering, making it loathsomely sterile and cold.
It can sometimes be hard to have faith in a character that has been as roundly lampooned as James Bond has. The temptation to copy a similar and bankable character that's getting a lot of play lately understandably arises when a solution seems unclear and when the box office potential is paramount. But the creators of 'Quantum of Solace' could have used their imaginations to rescue the Bond character, update him, and restore him to his rightful place as the gold standard for movie spies by highlighting or improving the positive aspects of this legendary fictional figure and throwing out some of the sillier stuff. They might have given us a fuller Bond who still gets the ladies and still digs his job.
Instead, they just hacked Jason Bourne.
What chumps.
This movie review by Erik Gloor