Best to worst in 24 months

Rating: 3/10 (28 March 2009)

Casino Royale was one of the best (and my favorite) Bond movies of all time. It was more gritty and realistic than most of the previous Bond films. The Daniel Craig Bond seemed more human, slightly flawed, but had a toughness and cleverness that made him believable as a super spy.
In Quantum of Solace he seems to have lost all his skills, talents and intelligence. He wanders from one scene to the next glumly commenting on insignificant details and seems to be deliberately ignoring something the audience never really sees. I told myself that Bond was just thinking about his inner demons, but the Bond in this movie never seems deep enough to have demons or feelings or thoughts. I now suspect Bond was just trying to ignore the weak plot. A super villain group MI-6 has never heard of? Good heavens! Lets panic! There's none of the clever quick-thinking saves or outsmarting of the bad guys we saw in the last movie. Bond never really does anything impressive at all. He just shows up and waits for things to happen around him.
Don't let me mislead you. There's a good bit of action. I have to say the balance between action and drama is close to perfect. But the execution of the action scenes is terrible. They're all shaky-camera MTV-style quick cuts that don't flow at all. And Bond never seems to have any impact on the outcome of the scenes. He doesn't think his way out. He doesn't fight his way out. He just sort of waits it out.
Not only are the action scenes awkward, but this film makes Americans look horrible. At least every white American. The only American in this film that's not a complete dirt-bag is of Arabic decent - but of course he ignores his conscience eventually presumably because he's American.
I'm not sure if the fact that this was the first Bond film not to be directed by someone from the Commonwealth had any thing to do with it's treatment of Americans. Whatever the cause, I wish they'd gotten someone else.
Casino Royale was destined to be a tough act to follow. But my disappointment in this film goes way beyond what you should reasonably expect from a sequel. Even a 22nd sequel.