Quantum of Plot

Rating: 4/10 (16 November 2008)

Quantum of Solace is about as fun as watching a car crash in slow motion. All you get is the collision, but it takes forever to get to that conclusion - The car has been crushed. Yes, we noticed. When the credits rolled for this movie, I had a difficult time trying to understand what it was about or what really happened in it, or rather which parts of these loose story threads they intended to be the actual "story" - all I knew for sure was that James Bond had killed a load of people. Actually, I'm going to make it easy on you. Quantum of Solace is about James Bond killing people. That's all you'll get from it. The verdict? Well, despite having less pretensions it is better than the downright horrible Rambo movie that came out early this year. How about that.
I had problems with Casino Royale, but I was the minority, and you'll just have to let those things go. Besides, it was a well-made piece of spy action, be that as it may that I didn't connect with it in the same way others did. Point is, I went in to Quantum of Solace knowing what to expect. I knew I would have to take this movie for what it was. Problem? That's just not very much.
So, the movie starts off with a routine car chase in Sierra, Italy. Along the narrow roads, Craig's bitter face is observing the random machine gun blokes in his windshield. I am already annoyed. I don't know who's to blame for this, it could be director Mark Forster or it could be the editors, but somebody is clearly not familiar with the action genre. Not only is this sequence tired and clichéd (and we are now talking about a 007 intro, where even the worst movies in the series could conjure up something imaginative in the first minutes), but it also has that classical flaw of action movies made by people with no knowledge of the genre - the scene isn't staged, but barely composed by a number of cuts. It's the easy way out, and it just becomes frantic, you loose your sense of orientation and eventually you just loose interest and starts to wait for the scene to be over, letting us get on with the movie. As the movie does get on, it is almost immediately interrupted by a chase sequence, also with every possibility to be good but spoiled by this boring mere montage of quick cuts.
From then on, the movie goes on and on and on and on. We get a car chase, a boat chase, an airplane chase, a fist fight, another fist fight, a shootout, an escape run, you name it, we've got it all. But it's all done by the numbers, you may say that a movie like The World Is Not Enough (1999) was hitting the marks of the formula, but Quantum of Solace is an action movie where every scene is obligatory and on the marks. Bond enters a quiet room, closes the door behind him, takes a few steps in the room. Count to four and there's a guy jumping out from the closet. There are two plot-point characters introduced... when will one be knocked off by the bad guys and when will the other turn out to be a double-crossing spy? And as I said, all of the action sequences are done with the same type of forced editing that isn't exhilarating, but will merely give you a headache. Not only is this just another action movie, it's a bad action movie.
You won't get anywhere trying to follow the story of this movie. Bond is on the trail of a crime organisation, well I guess that's natural. We don't get to know if 007 really is motivated by revenge or something else, and not in that top-of-the-iceberg/think-for-yourself kind of way, but we are simply not being told what he's thinking, what he's up to or, by that, what the point of the movie is. The villain, Greene (the only name in the movie tying to the tradition of funny names) is acting out as an environmentalist hero, but is actually in to buy up the water supply of Bolivia, by dealing with some mafia Lawrences there. Pretty exciting stuff, right?
I want to write more about Quantum of Solace, but I can't find anything interesting to say about it and that pretty much sums up the whole thing. It's a cold, gray, dead and poorly executed action film that's pretty boring to watch. That's it.