Solid followup to Casino Royale; grim closure

Rating: 7/10 (15 November 2008)

Even without the gimmicky gadgetry, the misogyny, and the Moneypenny, Quantum of Solace is an able entry in the long-running James Bond series. Although it is quite violent, the action is basically nonstop for the entire length of the movie, and Daniel Craig holds his own (again) as the now-towheaded, gritty superspy. Quantum of Solace is breathless and exhilarating, moving its minimalist plot so quickly that at times it's hard to tell exactly what's happening.
The action begins about one hour after the end of the last Bond film, Casino Royale, with a terrifying car-chase (and foot-chase) scene through an Italian town, as Bond is in hot pursuit of a man who may have some connection to the late Vesper Lynd of the previous film. Bond needs closure, you see; he needs to get over Vesper's death somehow, and to him that means finding out what she was all about. Through the course of his pursuits, he discovers that the trail leads to one Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a shifty entrepreneur who runs an eco-first company (Greene, get it?). But this being a Bond movie, Greene isn't the be-all, end-all villain, is he? Well, there's also a corrupt Latin American dictator-in-waiting; perhaps he'll do. Vying for Bond Girl status are Camille (Olga Kurylenko), who of course is with the evil Greene, and Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton), who's an agent with MI6 (but who's also barely seen in the movie anyway).
The most striking difference between this and the other Bond films, save for Casino Royale, is how angry James Bond is. Craig does a slow burn very well; he's not bristling with contempt, but you can tell it's smouldering just beneath the surface. He's bent on revenge, a fact that M (Judi Dench) picks up on rather quickly, so the question is: Can Bond put aside his emotions to concentrate on finding something about the new super-secret organization, following in the footsteps of SMERSH and SPECTRE, that's behind everything? M doesn't trust Bond entirely, in part because in the two films since the reboot he's killed basically everyone who's gotten in his way, even people who might have been useful.
But what makes this a Bond movie, exactly? There's Bond and M, and there's a Bond Girl with an intentionally wacky name (Strawberry Fields, according to the credits, and yes, she's a redhead). Craig's Bond is charming and ruthless (often simultaneously), and he's not prone to the sardonic one-liners that preceding Bonds were prone to spout. Now, one could argue that those lines were cheesy and dopey, but what they did was offset the action scenes. You don't get that in QoS, really; Craig's Bond is a man of few words. And he's single minded and unrelenting, striving to come to terms with Vesper's death before his grief can completely consume him.
Even with the rage and grimness, though, this is still quite an acceptable movie. After 46 years of Bond films, the audience has a good idea of what to expect from the movies: explosions, girls, chases, and Bond. Quantum of Solace, filmed in six countries, maintains the exotic-locale quotient, too, another staple of the series. (It would be too much to have James Bond do all of his spying in one country, certainly.) Jeffrey Wright returns (briefly) as CIA agent Felix Leiter, a character who's been in several of the Bond films (and was actually fed to Blofeld's sharks, off-screen, in Licence to Kill), and Jesper Christensen returns as Mr. White, last seen running at the end of Casino Royale. But there's no Q, and no Moneypenny, although rumor has it that both will appear in the next Bond film.
On the whole, Quantum of Solace is a satisfying popcorn movie. It's not overplotted - as had been the case with many others in the series - and the action is so frenetic that it is often tough to follow on its own merits, but because of the simplistic plot, one can put the pieces together easily anyway. One caveat: It seems that in many of those quick-paced hand-to-hand-combat scenes, Bond is dressed very similarly to his foe, thus making it difficult to tell who's winning. I'll never understand fight choreography. Oh, another question, too: If M is so darn smart, how come she sent an office clerk (Agent Fields!) to put Bond on a plane? Good Lord.