Artistic licence to kill

Rating: 6/10 (31 October 2008)

Daniel Craig returns to the role he saved from irrelevance and if we find him in a gloomy place, spare a thought for the blue eyed assassin - that's a dark corner he now shares with the filmmakers as well as the villains.
We have reason to fear Quantum. Their reach extends to the film's editors who are shadow men doing evil work to what you imagine was a fairly exciting thriller. They're complicit in an attempt to make each action sequence as elusive as possible. As an audience you're aware something is happening but it's like being caught in the middle of a bar fight having been glassed in the head from behind. This is maddening, frustrating editing  a Bond movie chewed up and passed through the Bourne Trilogy's celluloid digestive tract. Not even the theme song escapes this butchering. Constructing action this way is tossing money on the fire, necking whisky and urinating on the flames. Each sequence is as furious and cold as Craig's Bond but while this is highly effective as a tool for characterisation, its effect on each set piece is to brutally undermine the line of action, truncating what may have been show stopping moments and robbing them of those beats that fuel anticipation, nervous tension and most crucially, excitement.
The moments in between, where a Bond film breathes and is punctuated with humour, chic and yes, sex, are either mercilessly brief or absent and this makes Quantum of Solace feel slight and uninvolving. Obfuscation is the name of the game this time round but the filmmakers have extended this principle to the story and have confounded us all in the process.
Perhaps this pared down inelegance is what Bond's producers imagine a modern action audience wants, after all the aforementioned Bourne movies have been praised for their crack head cutting and real world brutality. The aesthetic is disorientating, messy but has a visceral punch that shakes up an audience in a way conventional editing struggles to replicate. That's fine of course but Bond's audience expects elegance, refinement and a sense of style, not stylisation that causes a film to eat itself. Solace struggles because it's so involved in machine gunning imagery into its audience that it forgets to entertain them. Consequently you have a strange post-view sensation that there was much that was good in it  Craig, the sumptuous visuals, the expressively mounted action, the Bolivian cab driver  it's just that you struggled to see much of it; it all fell between the gaps in the shots.
A prick tease picture through and through and the first movie to fully replicate the deep seated frustration that results from sexual abstention coupled with a gyrating beauty on your lap but one you can't touch because there's a gun in your mouth; Solace is still preferable to the series parodying itself but Royale showed you can pull this trick better and with greater heft.
A razor across your eyeballs, corneas ripped to shreds, Solace's climax has Bond and Camille, who watched her family burn, huddled as an inferno closes in around them. Teary and terrified she speaks for herself and the audience as shot after shot dies having only enjoyed barely a second of existence  mayfly editing; "not like this, not like this" she tells a battered Bond. Well quite.