Exciting and beautiful

Rating: 8/10 (28 November 2008)

Quantum of Solace would be the best James Bond film ever made, if it weren't for Casino Royale; and its first ten minutes may be even better. It's always intriguing, and often exciting or beautiful. Its main task is to confirm the direction the new series will take now that it's standing on its own two feet, without Fleming's novels for support. The new approach, as Casino Royale indicated, is more in keeping with the times, both in its realism, where it's realistic, and in its stylishness, where it isn't.
A big part of the new approach, it appears, is to allow Daniel Craig as Bond,to relax more into the role instead of always showing his pulp-fiction aspect; and the same for Judi Dench as M. We even get to see M doing her toilet at her dressing table. I question whether this idea worked. To me it looked as if both actors were out of character much of the time; but perhaps they weren't, perhaps the characters had been deliberately softened. Anyhow, their less spylike, more conversational attitude sometimes makes the film seem more like TV: like a terrific episode of The Saint.
What lifts it above the TV level, besides the budget, is a series of fight scenes, chase scenes, and spy scenes (notably, in the last category, a surveillance at an outdoor opera house) that are put together in ways I never saw before. In fact, sometimes the cutting is so fast, and the angles so oblique, that I didn't quite get what happened.
Also, the film has an eye for the Bond character like no film preceding, and paints some archetypal images of him as he's never been shown: for example, in his moments of stillness at the ends of fights or chases. Some of these images could be framed and hung in a gallery.
Casino Royale showed Bond as a man who moves from start to finish line in the swiftest possible fashion, parkour-style; Quantum expands on that to show him as one to whom no way or means to it is barred. The handiest door, path, or vehicle, he takes as his right, and as a matter of course, jumping from one to another without a second's hesitation--and the means sometimes appearing to hand with a readiness that defies probability. The earlier films pictured him doing the same, but not so wholly from his point of view. Sequences in this film make us know how it would feel to be always on the move, with no barriers to stop us; to be able to pass from one realm of action to another totally incongruous with it--from back-alley fight to fancy-dress party--and never turn a hair.
The film's plot is a very good plot, for Bond. But it's too slight for the film's full length: it lacks the scope and the basic appeal of the plots of Fleming's novels. And the point of it is never made clear in the dialogue (or if it is, I missed it). Bond goes looking for something, and he finds it, but not in the way he'd expected; that was then, this is now; he's already moved on; that's what he does. It's all clear enough in retrospect, but I didn't get it while I was watching, and had to work it out afterwards.
The supporting cast is excellent. The villain lacks the flamboyance of Fleming's villains, but is deliciously loathsome in his own right. The Bond girls are both engaging and challenging. Giancarlo Giannini, returning as Bond's ambiguous ally, is an actor who grounds any scene he appears in, as is Craig; they're perfectly matched.
While I was watching the film, I simply enjoyed it, and thought that was the end of the matter. But after I left the theater, I found my view of things transformed. The car was a glamorous weapon; driving was a thrill. I took a wrong turn onto an alley that ran behind a row of machine shops; one of the metal doors was standing open, and it looked like it gave onto a secret spy headquarters; across the alley a man in a parked car was glaring at me--was he a Bolivian agent? The alley suddenly turned into an unpaved stretch of mud, booby-trapped with potholes, and bending around out of sight; I wanted to take it at top speed, as far as it led, and crash through whatever barricade might rear up at the end. For a little while, life was an adventure.
You can't ask more from a movie than that.
Note: A number of reviewers have made a point of observing that this is the first Bond film to be a sequel; but technically, that isn't quite true. In From Russia with Love, the villains were out to get Bond for having killed Dr. No. In Diamonds Are Forever, Bond killed Blofeld (as he thought) for having killed his wife in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. There are probably other instances.