Good But Should Have Been Better

Rating: 7/10 (2 November 2008)

There had been some very Luke warm reviews of QOS when it was released last week . Perhaps one of the reasons being that CASINO ROYALE was so good that anything else after it would disappoint . So I popped in to the cinema to make up my own mind
Most of the best aspects remain from CASINO ROYALE . Daneil Craig if not the best Bond ever is certainly the best actor to have played him and his interaction with Judi Dench's M has plenty of on screen chemistry . Mathieu Amalric's villain Dominic Greene follows in the tradition of the Craig era Bond baddies in that he's not a megalomaniac sitting in a bunker trying to destroy the world , just a very greedy man wanting to make lots of money and killing anyone in stands in the way of his corporation . One can't help thinking that maybe a little more screen time could have been dedicated to character interaction
There are a few problems . As David Mahmet once said " You believe anything in film if you don't have reason to disbelieve it " so little bits like characters being able to see in an underground cave devoid of any light are something you may forgive down to cinematic conventions . There's also an assassin who looks like Rowan Atkinson in THE BLACK ADDER complete with an identical hairstyle ! I also wished the producers had a little more courage in keeping Greene as a self appointed self righteous environmentalist guardian right up to the end . If you've seen THE EIGER SANCTION you'll know where the screenwriters got Greene's fate from
Minor flaws that you can forgive . What is impossible to forgive however is some quite atrocious editing in the action scenes where everything is so " blink and you'll miss it " What makes it even worse is that director Marc Forster has some great visual ideas , especially a shoot out in a restaurant where the only sound heard on screen is the non diegetic sound of an opera but all this is bloody ruined by subliminal editing where shot lengths are micro seconds ! You'll have to see the movie to find out how terrible this looks . In fact a large per centage of the movie feels like it ended up on the cutting room floor
There's two ways of looking at this . One is the positive opinion in that QOS is infinitely better than some of the crap we saw under the Bond banner in the 70s and 80s , perhaps even better than some of the lesser Brosnan films . That is the correct opinion . The negative opinion is that QOS is ultimately disappointing in many ways and should have been better . Unfortunately that is also the correct opinion