Shaken not stirred

Rating: Null/10 (2 November 2008)

Following up the outstanding success of "Casino Royale" was always going to be a really tough mission and "Quantum Of Solace" - written as an immediate sequel to the earlier movie - is, while hugely entertaining, only a partial success.
The greatest plus is again Daniel Craig who has quickly made the 007 role his own. Here he is an agent full of controlled anger of the loss of his love Vesper Lynd who is visibly bloodied by the brutal, bone-crunching encounters that he faces and fights. We have a gorgeous Bond girl in the Ukrainian Olga Kurylenko (playing the Bolivian-Russian Camille) who - in a clever referencing of many of the Fleming novels - is a beautiful woman with a physical flaw (think of Honeychile Rider's broken nose). We have lots and lots of running and chases in every type of vehicle - whether car, boat or (pre-war) aircraft - and simply frenetic editing. It's all so fast and so furious, but actually too fast and too furious. Indeed the last two Bond films have so obviously been massively influenced by the box office takings of the Bourne trilogy.
What we don't have is a compelling narrative - the plot is really confused at times - or any of the humour or the gadgets that were so much a part of films earlier in the 45 year old franchise. For the second consecutive time, the main villain is a Frenchman (1066 and all that) but Mattieu Amalric as Dominic Greene is not so scary and we only glimpse the real Mr Big right at the end of the movie. Effectively there's no sex: Bond sleeps with one woman but we don't see them in bed and then she comes to a sticky end - which counterpoints the classic murder scene in "Goldfinger" - in terms which suggest that in future she should be known as Oil Fields. Even the music is a letdown: no use of the famous Monty Norman theme until the end and a terrible opening song.
In short: By the end of this 22nd outing, I was shaken but not stirred.