Bond NO! - Bond YES!

Rating: 6/10 (10 March 2020)

"Quantum of Solace" is a 2008 action thriller directed by Marc Forster starring Daniel Craig and Olga Kurylenko. It has been a hard week for Bond fans all over the world as the highly anticipated conclusion "No Time To Die" was delayed, but even though the final film of this saga was postponed to November, my brother and I decided to still keep on watching the previous films and will conclude this project in fall then. Til then we're gonna have some fun with them. Well, in the cases of the first sequel it's a slightly different business concerning enjoyment and quality. While the predecessor was an ingenious and well executed balance act between heart racing action sequences and packing thriller elements this one appears to just be the shadow of it. Too much in this feels uncomfortably poorly conceived and it resulted in a single mess. Over seventy percent of the film's criminally short run time consist of fast paced action scenes and chase sequences with too many explosions. At times it felt like I was watching Michael Bay's attempt of staging a story about the MI6 agent. It literally appeared they have taken one of the two cores of "Casino Royale" and tried to stretch it and make a whole movie out of it - while letting out the atmospheric thriller aspect. But it's not the only flaw the film suffers from: The script is also a dull and lazy mess of a plot. Most of the character decisions are utterly stupid and most of them are made by Bond himself and I couldn't recognise his character anymore. While he was cool, smart and always seemed to have had a Plan B before, he's shown a totally different behaviour here. Most of the actions were extremely stupid and made no sense considering he's a spy with a mission. He killed way too many people he was supposed to interrogate and threw himself in countless situations that should have cost his life, but he still managed to get out of them. You think because he has had all of it planned out? Well, no. He mostly was extremely lucky and somehow had to deal with even more stupid henchmen. It's nothing about calculation and keeping a cool head, he literally dived into every situation and could barely keep his head above water. It was almost hilarious and made me think that James's favourite hobby is to freak out M in any possible way and make all of his employers hate him. You can literally summarize all the scenes with "Bond No! - Bond Yes!" and I think that already says it all. It's not even better that the film attempts to be self aware of his behaviour, because it just isn't a comedy. Aside from this, the side characters introduced in here are characters I couldn't care less about. Camille was as shallow as the water at the beach of Haiti and Dominic Greene was a laughingstock compared to Le Chiffre. Having both of them as replacements and successors of Eva Green and Mads Mikkelsen respectively was a huge disappointment and an extreme downgrade. Even a reappearance of Mathis couldn't save it all. Wasn't the whole film supposed to be about the titular secret organisation "Quantum" in the first place? Funnily enough, I still didn't fully understand what it is all about. I did get that the organisation's purpose is e.g. to grant warlords the power to take over their countries, in this case in Bolivia, in exchange for oil and water. But where did it come from? Who founded it? Why didn't any of the secret intelligence agencies know about it? To me, it sounded like an extreme threat in the beginning, but in the end it appears to be nothing but a small gang of a French philanthropist who was smart enough to make deals with stereotypical Americans that crave for oil and profit. It's getting even funnier, cause after the final showdown Bond himself says that he finally knows what Quantum is. Why does the main character know the truth but I don't? Will it be dealt with in the sequels? Cause I sat there and had to laugh, because the so called secret organisation was anything but totally uncovered to me. Next to this, the final conclusion is one of the most untypical sequences in this film and only shows action again. Where's the intriguing thriller? There's only shooting and explosions, nothing more and all about revenge and not about a mission. All in all, this film is a messy and less lavishly elaborated copy of it's predecessor that counts on high speed action instead of being a thriller and consists of too much mindless behaviour and character decisions. It's an absolute downgrade and even though it's a decent fun, didn't leave any impact on me and is absolutely forgettable nevertheless. I only hope "Skyfall" will fly up again, cause this enactment is just a mess.