Quantum of Solace (2008)
After the might of
Casino Royale and a real return to form we have this, arguably the daftest title for a Bond movie of all,
Quantum Of Solace. Can it maintain the quality of Craig’s first outing? And just how will the thread of Vesper’s death be followed?
Pre-Existing Prejudices:
I fell asleep watching it in the cinema. That’s not a great recommendation, and though at least some of that might have been due to a couple of glasses of Sauvignon Blanc it’s certainly not the only reason. I’m generally unfamiliar with everyone in this movie who wasn’t in the last one, so I’m not carrying any prejudices in terms of the people appearing in it. And as far as I’m aware I haven’t seen it since its original release though, so I’ll go into this with an open mind and try to find a fresh perspective on it. I cannot, however, promise I will succeed.
The Actual Movie:
We kick off with a car chase! No messing about (or explanation)! Lots of exciting action in a…. tunnel. Bond’s driving a(nother) Aston which takes a fair old beating. And now… a gravel pit! Ah, happy memories of
Doctor Who and
Blakes 7. Eventually, and slightly incoherently, the car shooting at Bond goes off a cliff, then we’re in a secret underground tunnel in Siena, Italy… where the boot is opened to reveal his cargo – Mr White (you know, from the end of the last film – well I hope you do, because Bond doesn’t offer us any explanation).
Curvy ladies are back in the title sequence. And a really, really terrible song.
On return, we get a flood of exposition. White’s being interrogated, the boyfriend Vespa was supposed to be protecting was meant to wash up dead, but it was a fake, and Bond isn’t interested in revenge, or so he says. Mr White is being interrogated regarding Quantum – not that they’ve been named yet – but one of the guards is a double agent. The guard makes a break for it and Bond pursues, emerging into a horse race, then eventually a rooftop chase. It all ends in a scaffolding fight that would do Mario proud, and Bond gets his shot. White escapes in the kerfuffle, not that we’re actually shown this, just told about it. Leaving Italy behind it’s now time for London – a shitty apartment and a rattled M, who wants to know who the “secret organisation” is, and why they know nothing about it. Some money has been traced to Port-au-Prince, so that’s where Bond is off to and where the now-dead guard had a contact. A quick hand to hand fight by way of introduction and Bond gets picked up by a mysterious lady, who is pursued by someone on a bike – she ditches Bond, he pursued on the bike… this is all pretty incoherent. She meets Dominique Greene, they have a bit of a shouting match (he tried to have her killed, but she was trying to help?), he killed the geologist… erm, lots of exposition that adds up to nothing basically. There’s a dictator, General Medrano, that wants his country back too, in exchange for giving Greene some desert – Camille is given to him as a deal sweetener. Bond spies her getting taken to the ship so brace for a boat chase – one she is spectacularly unwilling to take part in. Bond escapes but she’s knocked out.
On landing Bond hands her to some random guy – she’s seasick! – while he calls home for more exposition. Geene is head of the puntastically named Greene Planet, and M find out the Americans are also interested in him – oh there’s Felix in the background – and Bond follows Greene to a plane… which has Felix and the American section chief inside. The Americans won’t stop a Bolivian coup in return for drilling. Felix denies knowing Bond, and the plane lands in Bergen. Where Bond is. Off to the opera we go! Greene is in attendance, so this’ll be the movie’s excuse to get everyone in a tux. The production of
Tosca launches into full effect, and Bond listens into to the conversation about controlling, “the world’s greatest resource”. Bond drops into the
conversation and the members of the organisation meeting all make a (stupid) move, revealing themselves. We then get the big fight sequences scored to
Tosca – excellent – and Bond sends the members’ pictures to M (stop snickering at the back). Because Bond killed someone from Special Branch and refuses to come in, M cancels his cards and passports. Instead of coming in, Bond goes to see Mathis from the last movie to get a some plastic and passport – he’s hanging out in Italy with a lovely new villa after being falsely accused last time round. He persuades Mathis to come with him to Bolivia to investigate the pipeline there. He’s met at the airport by an Agent Fields whose orders are to put him on the first plane to London – but that’s tomorrow so they have a little time. The hotel Ms Fields has booked is shitty, so they go to the Grand instead. Sure. Obviously they sleep together, then it’s off to a party at Greene Planet. Dominic Greene gives a speech about the Tierra Project. Camille is there (remember her?) and there’s a mild stand-off. Oh and Felix is there not looking very happy. Camille and Bond leave the party but are pulled over by the police. Turns out Mathis’s body is in the trunk – they’ve been set up – but he’s not quite dead. He gets a death scene, though, which is decent. Bond and Camille head out to see the Tierra Project into the desert, hiring a plane to get there. That of course means a sky battle, preceded by Yet. More. Exposition (Camille is ex-Bolivian secret service blah blah don’t care). It’s… Ok – little of the battle looks like it takes place more than about five feet off the ground. Still they apparently get high enough to parachute out in a rush of dreadful special effects, surviving only because they fall into a sink-hole. Then it’s M’s turn for a bit of exposition, then Camille’s bog-standard revenge plot… for fuck’s sake Get On With It!
Camille and Bond have, luckily enough, fallen into an exposition sink-hole – turns out Greene isn’t after oil at all, but rather water. They amble out of the desert into a town that looks like it was put together by Sergio Leone and catch a bus. Well, this is quite the action thriller. They go back to the hotel, and M is waiting. Fields has been drowned in oil – in a strikingly similar manner to
Goldfinger – and Bond makes a break for it. But before that it turns out M has back after all. Camille swings round in a VW Beetle and they’re off… to make contact with Felix. Who tips him off, delivers some info and Bond makes a run for it.
Back to the desert again, and somewhat-expensive looking hotel in the middle of nowhere. General Medrano is there and there’s a mention of fuel cells which sound unstable. Wonder what might happen there? Greene turns up at the hotel – it does look rather lovely, and has a nice bar – and there’s lots of dramatic music as people walk down some corridors. Thrillingly, Greene gets a signature. And forces the General to make “his organisation” the utilities suppler for water. Utilities providers? Could this get any more exciting? Camille slips in, followed by Bond. A Land Rover reverses into a power cell, setting off a lot of
exposition explosions. She’s off on her one-woman revenge mission. Bits of the hotel explode. More bits of the hotel explode. Bond goes after Greene as more bits of the hotel explode. Fight. Boom. Fight. Boom. She eventually shoots the General but ends up curled in a ball as the hotel explodes. Again. Bond leaves Greene not dead to rescue her, not really excitingly, and Greene finally escapes into the desert. Bond leaves his stranded in the desert with a can of motor oil as his only suicide option. She’s left – well, abandoned really, having fulfilled her plot function – deciding to help dismantle Greene’s work, while Bond heads to Russia to mop up his unfinished business. It’s Vesper’s former boyfriend, the one who was meant to have been dead at the start of the film but wasn’t… but really, who gives a shit any more? A final bit of exposition between Bond and M, and Bond leaves Vesper’s necklace in the snow. How terrible. I mean, sorry, how terrible for him.
They try to convince us that any of this was even faintly interesting by ending with the gun-barrel sequence and the Bond theme.
No dice.
In Conclusion:
An incoherent, senseless, noisy mess from beginning to end,
Quantum of Solace tries very, very hard to follow up on the new, pared-back style of
Casino Royale and misses by such a wide margin that what we end up with is one of the very worst Bond films of all. That
Casino Royale nailed the “new style” so brilliantly just makes this even more disappointing, especially since, for the first time in the Bond series,
Quantum of Solace is a direct sequel, picking up on plot and characters from the last film and using them to actually drive the story rather than being a standalone. That’s hardly remarkable in most movie series’ but for Bond it’s a first and it’s dispiriting to see such an innovation fall so flat. But before we go any further, I do need to clear up one point – a lot of this review is going to be, “so where did things go wrong?” and of course the answer in almost every case is “the writers strike”. But I don’t care about the writers strike – I'm simply reviewing what we have on screen, not what happened behind it. So, yes, the writers strike crippled production and unquestionably led to the mess that this movie became, but that’s too bad – it might be an explanation but it will not be used, here, as an excuse.
A lot of the problems with
Quantum of Solace do come down incoherence. Sometimes in terms of narrative, sometimes in terms of character, sometimes in terms of action – but let’s start with the last and least important of those. Action is obviously a key component of What James Bond Movies Do, and generally speaking it’s something the series does well. Oh sure, there are moments you can point to and suggest otherwise – oh look, there’s
Die Another Day sitting right there – but in broad terms the action, when used properly, should be a key component of a Bond movie working. And straight out of the gate, without even so much as a gun-barrel sequence, we get dropped right into the middle of a car chase. How thrilling! Except... it’s not, particularly. It does all the things a thrilling car chase
ought to do, with machine-gun totting bad guys, and explosions, and jeeps flying of cliffs, you know the sort of thing – but none of it really coheres. That’s in part due to the shaky camerawork – a recurring issue in the action throughout
Quantum of Solace – but it’s also just a bit pedestrian. I don’t want to repeat the gravel-pit line from The Actual Movie, but you know – it's not the
most exciting of locations. And then at the end of it all, Bond opens the trunk of the car, and who’s inside? That’s right, it’s some guy! The film makes absolutely zero effort to explain to us who this person is. I only watched
Casino Royale a few weeks ago and I didn’t identify Mr White on sight, so goodness knows how many people were left scratching their heads after years having passed between movies while Jack White and Alicia Keys parp up. This happens a lot during the film as well – lines or exposition are delivered and clearly signified as important but the film never takes the time to explain to us why. Mr White was only in
Casino Royale for approximately 30 seconds! It’s a
big ask of your audience to expect them to remember someone that was hardly even a presence. “It’s time to get out, Mr White. We’ve got some questions for you,” is literally all it would take to fix this – it establishes who the character is with a name people watching might actually remember, it implies what’s going to happen, and it gives us a reason to be invested in the previous five minutes of no-dialogue-all-action. But it’s not there. That’s not the only failing of the action here, because it oftentimes feels like there’s nothing else going on – the first thirty or so minutes of the film contain a dizzying array of action, usually interspersed with rather tedious exposition, and rarely is it engaging. The Big Chase around Siena, with Bond pursuing the guard, only has one moment of note which is the fight around the scaffolding. At last the giddy, jittery camerawork suddenly lines up with a situation which is actually meant to vertiginous, and it works well. But all that running around over roofs? Seen it all before. It's fairly slick – and it’s nice to see Bond using a bit more grace than he did in the last movie, a nice, subtle attempt to show some development from his thuggish crashing about during the parkour sequence in
Casino Royale – but it’s not especially engaging. It’s just a chase. The exception to this is, of course, the big
Tosca sequence, where slow-motion, opera and editing align to produce a properly impressive, and genuinely different, type of action sequence. It’s almost breathtaking in places, as the action is interspersed with scenes of the performance, and it builds a genuine sense of momentum to become actually thrilling. But it’s also undercut a bit because the match-action-with-something-else technique has already been used once this film, when the guard escaped after nearly killing M, where the gunfight and escape is interlaced with scenes of a horse race taking place above. The re-use of this technique, effective though it is in the
Tosca sequences, makes it look like the film has hit the half-way mark and already needs to repeat ideas. I’m not going to go through every single action sequence, but the film never comes close to matching the inventiveness of that sequence anywhere else, and often falls way, way below it.
Quantum’s a bit of a damp squib at well. “How can there be a global secret organisation and we know nothing about it?” asks M rhetorically. Yes, well, quite. I mean, obviously it’s a
secret organisation, but even so the film doesn’t especially choose to give us much in the way of an answer. They just are. Even without knowing that the real deal – SPECTRE – are going to be amble back into proceedings in a couple of film’s time (and that will raise a whole host of other questions) Quantum still come across as a poor attempt to basically do the same thing. We’re spared some bald guy with a cat this time out, but none of the members of this super-secret organisation that can put someone literally anywhere in the world including MI-6 seem especially smart. Bond jumps on the comms at the opera where they’re all having their secret get-together to discuss their secret plans for the secret whatever-it-is-they're-trying-to-do and they all just stand up and leave, thus immediately revealing their presence and allowing Bond to get some nice juicy close-ups of them all. D’oh! Did not one of them think, “huh, maybe I’d be better to wait and leave with the crowd, security in numbers and then I won’t be identified”? Idiots. They deserve to be defeated, quite frankly. The film does a lousy job of persuading us to care about Quantum or what they’re up to, and that’s at least in part because what they’re up to is... um... something with water and making Bolivia change their utility provider? How utterly exhilarating. Look, in principal the idea of the Big Resource being fought over being water rather than oil (“The World Is Not Enough”) or solar energy (“The Man With The Golden Gun”) or something more obvious is an interesting one. The film doesn’t come close to giving us a reason to give a shit, but the impetus behind it is at least a sound one. But Quantum are involved because... um, Generalissimo Stereotype, who seems to have wandered over from a Loony Tunes short so cartoonish is he, has a nice hotel in the desert maybe? Though, actually, not that nice a hotel. It looks OK in a location-scout-found-somewhere-a-bit-different sort of way, but it’s childishly easy to blow up the secret lair. The whole thing is basically destroyed by a Land Rover trundling backwards a few meters, suggesting that to defeat
this evil plan they didn’t need MI6's finest agent but instead the whole scheme could have been brought crashing down by an absent-minded soccer mom forgetting to put on the parking break. That’s not a
great look for the series, or for the supposed threat Quantum are supposed to represent. The frustrations with these sequences are compounded by the fact that rather than killing Greene, Bond allegedly interrogates him in exchange for his life, so when Greene walks off into the desert and Bond catches up with him Greene gets the line, “I told you everything you wanted to know!” and Bond confirms that this is, indeed, the case. Except we never get to see that scene! Arrgh! The film has given us endless reams of exposition that amounted to next to nothing, yet the one scene of exposition we
need, the one that gives us a reason to give a damn about Quantum, is completely missing! That’s just... useless.
You’ll notice I haven’t gotten around to really mentioning any of the characters yet, and that’s because they’re all rubbish. Other than the regulars – Dench and Craig are typically excellent despite the material they’re given to work with, and Dench is especially look at looking rattled after her near-shooting – almost no other character makes an impact. As a bad guy, Dominic Greene is just pathetic. Bugging out your eyes and trying to sneer a bit doesn’t constitute acting, and Mathieu Amalric can’t invest anything in to the character of Greene to make him actually come alive. He’s on screen but has no screen presence at all. He and Craig only really share one scene of significance prior to the climax – Craig not only acts him off the screen but the whole scene is shot and delivered in a way that suggests Bond could deal with this guy by just stepping on him like a bug, but there’s still another forty minutes of the film to go so he’d better not. Le Chiffre was also a weak man whose reach extended beyond his grasp, but in Mads Mikkleson there was a class actor able to give the character real presence while still remaining true to the core of that character’s failings. The poker scenes might go on a bit too long, but at least there’s a sense of enmity that builds between Le Chiffre and Bond as they struggle for dominance. Here... nothing. Greene’s the bad guy because that’s what he is. Nothing more, nothing less. Ah, but we also have our Standard Female Protagonist, this time played by Olga Kurylenko as the less-than-impressive Camille Montes. And what’s she given to do? A basic revenge plot that’s just a carbon-copy of the one from
For Your Eyes Only. But what looked innovative, or at least interesting, in 1981 looks like a hoary old cliché in 2008. Parents killed, out for revenge, yadda yadda. It’s
exactly the same. It was probably a good idea to avoid the more traditional “Bond girl” stereotype here as the leading lady – Bond, after all, is meant to be dealing with the heartbreak of losing Vesper, so pairing him with the usual glamour-and-sleep-together set-pieces might have looked a little crass. His path and Camille’s only intersect really by co-incidence, and she
definitely doesn’t sleep with him, so that crassness is avoided, which feels like the right decision. Oh but wait, he sleeps with Ms Fields instead and gets her killed as a result, so in fact the crassness is there after all. Ah well. Actually Agent Fields (referred to in the credits, but not on screen, as Strawberry Fields) is quite a nice character to spend time with, and almost the only one who isn’t dourly humourless, so obviously she doesn’t last long. But with Camille there’s not much to say – Generalissimo Stereotype killed her parents and she does get to kill him (I guess that’s something?) so the revenge arc is completed, but she also drops out of the movie for a big chunk of time – she’s literally just dropped off – as the script apparently completely forgets about her, returning only at a plot-convenient moment. She's very difficult to care about. However, we do, at least, get to spend a bit more time with Mathis – remember him from the last movie? - and that’s welcome in the extreme, given the desert (ho-ho) of other interesting characters on display. Giancarlo Giannini is given a bit more to do here, and he gets one absolute killer scene with Daniel Craig as they fly out to Bolivia. It’s a quiet scene, with Bond drunk and depressed while they discuss the problems of sleeping, and it’s a terrific little moment. The movie could have done with a lot more of those moments. Or indeed any more of them. Felix is in this, by the way, and it’s nice to see Jeffrey Wright’s hangdog face but, other than the fact that we finally have a Leiter that’s been in two films sequentially played by the same actor he contributes very little. Wright, and Leiter, deserve better, but then so do we all.
The truth is that it’s very easy to be scathing of
Quantum of Solace, and finding anything worthy of redemption is a real challenge. The ultimate sin it commits though, is the one sin that James Bond can never be forgiven for – this film is dull. That slew of action in the opening thirty minutes just can’t disguise how boring all of this is. The action almost never contributes to the plot, so we get a battle of some sort – boat, plane, car, it’s all the same – then the film stops dead so that Bond or M can deliver exposition after exposition in the dullest way possible, then it’s back to the action that achieves nothing, then more exposition… the film is passably watchable when things blow up but as stagnant as a three-week-old pool of water when things don’t. It’s the classic tell-don’t-show. Bond goes through a number of set-pieces, but there’s no feeling that he’s actually
investigating anything or working out what’s going on, he just moves from location to location where someone will handily turn up to explain a bit of plot (often fairly poorly), then it’s off to the next location. Bolivia never convinces much as a location because all we see of it is one mansion and some desert – it could be Israel, Australia or the Gobi for all the sense of location we get. We get the early part of the movie set in Italy because that follows on from
Casino Royale, but then later in the movie it turns out Mathis is
also in Italy, which makes it looks like the producers saved themselves a few quid by just shooting up the road rather than have him be somewhere that feel like it logically extends from the character. Though the actor is Italian, the character is French, and surely it couldn’t have been that expensive to pop over the border to shoot a few scenes in a chateau? Anyway, it’s typical of the laziness of
Quantum of Solace, taking the easiest route available and then not bothering to explain why. Craig does his best to try and sell Bond’s heartache throughout the film, but the Vesper plot peters out in the least remarkable fashion possible, and that whole final scene in Russia, where Bond finally confronts Vesper’s ex-boyfriend? What a complete disaster. It’s meant to be the emotional core of the whole movie and all we get is M asking Bond if he, “got what you were after?” and he says yes, drops Vesper’s necklace and wanders off as if he can’t really be bothered with this shit any more.
That’s your climax to a two-movie arc of love, loss, revenge and acceptance? We don’t even
see The Big Confrontation? Nor have any understanding of what may or may not have transpired? Fuck. Off.
So yes,
Quantum of Solace is a shoddy disaster. The few grace notes that do exist can’t come close to compensating for the slapdash, amateurish nature of what’s presented here. Mistakes that would have been glaringly obvious when Connery wore the tux still get trundled out here. Every single key component of the film (dead lover/heartbroken Bond, Evil Plan to control Some Crucial Resource, parental-death-revenge-plot, secret organisation, Bond on the run and on his own without government back-up) has not only been done before, but done better before. Other than the five-minute
Tosca sequence there’s nothing that
Quantum of Solace does that earlier Bond films haven’t done better, and usually
much better. The theme is rubbish. The title sequence is rubbish.
Everything is rubbish. After such a confident, near-flawless start, the Craig era has already hit the buffers in far-from-spectacular form. The only question now is – will this be a permanent decline or will
Skyfall turn things around?
Ah, but that’s for the next review…
What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut? Eesh. Having spent the preceding
twenty-two movies having a section which implies Bond films are almost always overlong, the one thing that can be said about
Quantum of Solace is that it weighs in at an hour and three quarters and so definitely isn’t. It might
feel like it goes on for fucking ever, thanks to the interminable scenes of things being poorly explained at us, but it doesn’t. The length makes it relatively hard to pick things that could be cut – I don’t want to suggest we need any more of this film, because we definitely don’t, but as I’ve said a couple of times now there’s key scenes missing which ought to be there and rather than shortening this movie I’d rather those scenes in place and lose some of the tedious standing about the place. If I’m being strictly honest, the Miss Fields material doesn’t add anything to the movie and could go, but she’s a lone spark of light in among all this gloom and I don’t want to lose her. Jack White and Alicia Keys can go, if that helps, but I’ll just give this a
0% and say that it’s impossible to care whether any of it gets cut or not – I’ll likely be asleep either way.
Quip Level:
Not so much
Low as non-existent, and that’s part of the problem. Bond movies don’t need to have quips, puns and one-liners non-stop to be good, but
Quantum of Solace is a dour, joyless movie that strikes a self-serious tone from the word go and never lets up. The glum, largely miserable tone of the movie really never contributes anything though, it’s just another factor that stops any of this being remotely entertaining.
Licence To Kill was pretty morose for most of its running time as well, but at least it was able to leaven that into a singular focus – Bond’s revenge – and use it to drive the characterisation. There’s none of that here, everyone’s just dejected for nearly a couple of hours then the credits roll. Since much of the script is just having bits of the plot explained to us in the most boring way possible a few jokes or the odd funny line might at least have helped the bitter pill of over-explanation to go down a bit easier but this time that’s asking too much. Almost the only funny line comes from, of all people, M, who gets to make a crack about Quantum having people everywhere which is normally something people say about florists. Dench’s impeccable comic timing and delivery – something she doesn’t get enough credit for – really makes the line funny while at the same time letting her still seem rattled by what’s happened. The film aches for more moments like that. Alas, it is not to be.
2018 Cringe Factor:
Well there’s Generalissimo Stereotype most obviously. Medrano is the worst kind of lazy-South-American-dictator-cliché imaginable, a big, fat, moustachioed, trite piece of nothing, dressed in green combat fatigues without a single defining characteristic that marks him out as a character rather than a cardboard cut-out. He puffs on a cigar, of course, and has speeches about how he wants to take back his country but is really just as corrupt as anyone else. Who. Cares. Gasp with surprise as he’s violent towards women! Raise your eyebrows in shock as it turns out he’s a rapist and a murderer! Etcetra. Maybe Joaquín Cosío is terrific in other movies, I can’t really say, but he’s definitely not in this one. For the rest, it’s not so much cringe inducing as just dispiriting at how quickly the wheels came off the Craig era. We don’t even get enough background to the Bolivia material for there to be the potential for something uncomfortable there, and the Italy stuff is mostly fine despite one old woman who shouts “mama mia!” when her tomatoes get knocked off their rope by Bond. Oh, but one other thing I want to mention, which is Miss Strawberry Fields. She’s great! I really wish we’d been given her first name, spoken, on screen, because it’s a return to the silly names of past Bond movies without it just being a stupid innuendo and it would have provided a bit of light relief in among all this ponderousness. As character Ms Fields is rather great, a very minor victory for the film but all credit to Gemma Arteron for investing a real energy into a third or fourth tier character. I do, however, have to also mention the method of her departing, drowned in oil and left covered in the stuff while draped over a hotel bed. Yes, in
exactly the same way Jill Masterson was in
Goldfinger, that’s right! And Bond feels guilty here in exactly the same way he did there too! It’s a really weird little beat in the film – it’s clearly recreating an iconic moment from the Bond series which the Craig era thus far has gone out of its way to avoid, but it’s done for apparently no reason whatsoever, either on screen or off. It’s a frankly baffling decision. In
Skyfall it might have made sense – it’s the big anniversary movie and it’s chock-full of references to the series. But here? It’s simply bewildering. I’ll give the movie an
Ouch this time out for Medrano and just be grateful to leave all of this behind.