Quantum of Solace review

Ah.. so Quantum of Solace eh? I think this review will be shorter than most because.. well, it’s not a long series, it’a a 1:30 hour movie.

Quantum of Solace (2008) is the 22nd James Bond film by EON Productions, released in the United Kingdom on 31 October 2008 and in North America on 14 November. The direct sequel to the 2006 film Casino Royale, it is directed by Marc Forster, and features Daniel Craig’s second performance as James Bond. In the film, Bond battles Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a member of the Quantum organisation posing as an environmentalist, who intends to stage a coup d’état in Bolivia to take control of its water supply. Bond seeks revenge for the death of Vesper Lynd, and is assisted by Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko), who has her own vengeance issues.

Story

To be honest, I didn’t really think much of the story in Quantum of Solace, it seemed like an unorganised clusterfuck of “what the shit is happening?”, there’s this huge amazing organisation known as Quantum (there may be spoilers here, be warned) with agents in seemingly every high level goverment agency across the world, they have people in the M16, CIA and to quote Mr White “everywhere”. So.. this organisation then somehow gets found out by Bond almost by luck in some random opera event? Right. Oh, and then in the end it turns out to be just some random person who wants water and such. Which brings me onto a rather retarded point, so he wanted to sell the person water from the land he bought off him.. and threatened to kill him if he didn’t? Why didn’t he just threaten to kill him for money, and keep the water? That makes no sense at all. Overall I thought it was a rushed and.. well, bad story. Oh sure it tried to be deep with its “hur hur there is no right and wrong we just need oil” but just taking stuff from the news and awkwardly smashing it into your script =/= deep or interesting. Oh yeah and they liked to pretend there was the element of Bond getting “revenge” for that ho from the first film who killed herself. Yeah they pretty much just ignored that and crammed it in the end as if they forgot about it.

Characters

I think Daniel Craig did an alright job as Bond, certainly different from all the other Bonds, more “realistic” you could say, but.. well.. I don’t really know how to put this. Perhaps in the books (which I do have, they are behind me in fact, I’ve just never read them) Bond is alot more realistic.. but in the films, he isn’t. He’s an OTT character who is quite frankly ridiculous. He has absurd gadgets, absurd luck, and for some reason women fall over to sleep with him. Craig’s Bond is in a more “realistic world” thus there are no gadgets, but he’s still some ridiculously overpowered human who can somehow defeat 3 MI6 agents with his hands cuffed in the closed area of a lift (which let me tell you, is nigh impossible), and then the fact that all the women he meets are apparently huge sluts, just seems quite frankly ridiculous in the supposedly more “realistic world”. It may seem like I’m coming off overly harsh, but as I’ve said before I prefer to dwell on the negative. That’s not to say I didn’t like Bond, I think Daniel Craig did a pretty good job with what he had to work with. As I mentioned earlier though, his character really didn’t grow in a believable way through the film. He starts off grumpy and ends up grumpy, just with a slightly better restraint (aka he doesn’t magically kill everyone). Still.. it didn’t really feel like Bond. If you took out the tuxedo and British accent, he’d just be Jason Bourne. ‘Cos to be honest, it did feel alot like a Bourne movie to me. I’ll touch on that later though.

The other characters were forgettable, there was a generic villain who they foolishly decided to make as generic as possible in order to make him realistic/believable/highlight the hidden evil in society or whatever, that’s all well and good, but he had nothing that made him a remarkable villain. He looked normal and was just a generic “yeah I have no personality whatsoever and want money/power etc”. There was also the french guy or whatever, who was like a quadruple crossing scallywag. Felix from Casino Royale who had the “grr I don’t like what I’m doing but I’ll do it anyway” cliched role. Then there was this weird European girl who I think was trying to put on a spanish accent or something, hell if I know, she was so tanned I thought she was African at first. Theeeen there was the only character who’s named I actually remembered as I found it funny, “Strawberry Fields”, who was some random M16 person Bond slept with, and then she promptly died. Logical. Oh right and then there was M.. seriously I did NOT need to see her on a 1000000 foot screen rubbing scream on her really old and wrinkly face.. come on.

Everything else

Gee, what is there to say. Whoever directed it was awful. As I mentioned earlier, it felt alot like a Bourne film, as the action scenes

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sort of like that, I really really really despite action scenes when they just spazz the camera around like WOOAH LISTEN TO THE VISCERAL CRUNCH AND SMASH AND SO ON. It just means you CAN’T SEE WHAT’S HAPPENING AT ALL. Now, I think that style sort of worked in the Bourne movies.. just not in a Bond movie. I think overall the director tried to make it too realistic, but then overlooked the fact that Bond somehow pulled super-human abilities out of his ass, along with super-human endurance. Overall I thought the worst part of the movie was the camera work and directing, there were a few shots that really didn’t fit at all, I have to admit I don’t really know the right term for them, but I’m going to go out and say “matrix style long panning shots of a short moment of action”, they just really didn’t fit with the style of the film, maybe in Die Another Day, where we have cars that backflip off ice and white koreans with crystals in their faces etc.

To be frank, I didn’t really think it was that good a movie. Much like Code Geass R2, it was entertaining to watch, but really not that good. Like a cheap action movie you watch on TV with Arnold M8nigger in. It tried to be deep, failed, tried to evolve the character and failed, tried to be realistic and failed, tried to be a Casino Royale.. and failed. Casino Royale was good, this was not.

Then again.. I cba to give it a score out of 10, so I’ll just say if you want to see it, feel free. Just don’t expect anything amazing. Oh okay if you forced me to score it out of 10, I’d give it a 5, whereas I’d give Casino Royale (in comparison) a 7 or 8.

What next? You tell me..