A massive disappointment...

Rating: 5/10 (7 June 2009)

I have just returned from a screening of Quantum of Solace and am struck by how it left me completely cold. Bored is one thing I never thought I could feel in a Bond film. Casino Royale was a brilliant addition to the Bond canon - it had the vintage feel of a classic Bond film, a newly-defined Bond with a Flemingesque ruthlessness and gimlet eyes, a very fine villain in Mads Mikkelson, and a great script written with the aid of the award-winning screenwriter to Crash.
The screenwriters to Quantum seem to have done an about face. We are left with the Brosnan antics of Die Another Day - preposterous stunts, back-to-back action with little development of plot or character, little time for any chemistry between Bond and the female lead, a denouement in a villain's lair in the desert with all the ludicrousness of a Roger Moore instalment. And that makes sense, because the screenwriters for this film are the same ones as worked on the Brosnan franchise.
Something didn't square at all, and I think a large factor is the script. We don't need camp humour or biting one-liners, but we do need dialogue. The showdown between Bond and Dominic Greene required some kind of conflict, after all right from the beginning of Casino we have been led towards this climax between these two men, and yet Marc Foster had given is nothing in the screenplay to suggest that these two men had a developed hatred of one another.
Mathieu Almaric cuts a puny villain, and his henchmen are all puny henchmen. Gone is Grant or Oddjob or Rosa Klebb or Nick-Nack or Tee-Hee. Greene's henchman, who is called Elvis in the credits, but is never referred to by name in the film, wears a toupee and is weedy and ineffectual. There is no drama at all between him and Greene. You can't fault Almaric as a villain because he has absolutely nothing to work with. The demented turn Greene takes with an axe at the film's close is perhaps really Almaric venting his frustration out on the flat character he has been given.
The theme song was appalling. I can't recall a truly evocative Bond song since the days when John Barry composed the score, but this one really was the pits.
It may be that the thirty minutes of commercials (a lot of them playstation combat or apocalyptic games) before the film commenced had already numbed me for Bond, but in any case the action was sheer overkill. Back-to-back Bond in a car, Bond on a rooftop, Bond in a boat, Bond in a plane, and then I finally realised that it could just as well be any action hero as Bond. The camera never allowed you to settle on Craig in action, the viewer is just roughly manhandled from scene to scene, from one roller-coaster to the next. Whole sequences, as others have said, were lifted straight out of the Bourne franchise - the opening car chase like bumper cars, the naturalistic close combat with a double agent in a Haitian apartment, the epilogue in a snow swept Russia that ties up all the loose ends (the epilogue to The Bourne Supremacy anyone? also set in a snow swept Russia, tying up loose plot-threads).
Finally, the dastardly plot. Just what is it? Greene is hoarding vast reserves of water in the Bolivian desert to do what? Sell it for extortionate prices to Bolivian farmers? I may be wrong, but Bolivia last time I checked was a small South American nation with a negligible GNP and a people who had suffered under one lousy regime after another. If Greene really wanted a plot for global domination, he should monopolise the oil industry and hoard it so that consumers all over the world have to pay extortionate prices at the pump. Now we all know that is a plot that can work.
All this is a crushing pity, because, for my money, Craig could just possibly be the best Bond we've had (and I know this may ring like blasphemy to Conneryphiles). A blunt instrument is what he is, just like Fleming's Bond.
Sorry about the rant, but someone needed to give this film a rundown. Anyway, definitely enough said.