To get back to the issue at hand (again apologies for the OT posts), here's TIME magazine's review of Quantum of Solace.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1858881,00.htmlQuantum of Solace: Bourne-Again BondBy Richard Coirliss - Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008He has a stolid face and solid musculature, which we know because he goes topless more than his leading ladies do. He has vigorous skirmishes on roofs, in cars and in hotel rooms. He takes as severe a beating--and shows as much emotion--as a crash-test dummy. He's a government spy whom his government wants dead, and he's mourning the violent death of his girlfriend. He so resembles another famous agent that you half-expect him to say, "The name is Bourne. Jason Bourne."
The hero of Quantum of Solace is James Bond, headlining the 22nd "official" film in the series, stretching back to Dr. No in 1962, based on the character created by Ian Fleming and overseen by the Broccoli family. But in movie history, 46 years is a long time--nearly half the life span of feature-length movies themselves--and a film franchise, like any organism, must adapt to survive. The 007 of Quantum of Solace is not your grandfather's Bond, the suave, larkish Etonian whose success as the movies' alpha male sparked dozens, possibly hundreds of imitators in the 1960s spy genre.
He may not be Fleming's Bond either. The early novels were intended as light entertainments; they inhabited a world in which an überstud with refined tastes (the right car, martini recipe, cigarette) also accessorized by bedding beautiful, willing, duplicitous women; it's no coincidence that 007 and Playboy were the prime male icons of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Bond occasionally engaged in fisticuffs with a brigand, but that was just a different kind of workout. As played by Sean Connery and Roger Moore from the '60s through the '80s, Bond greeted each new threat to his life with an upper-class smile.
Daniel Craig plays Bond now, and his turn in Casino Royale in 2006 hit the reset button on the franchise. Like the Christian Bale Batman Begins, the Craig Casino showed a young man taking his first steps toward superhero status. He was stern and ferocious, similar to protagonists in the grittier, glummer, more violent action-adventure films of the past few years. The new 007 was the ultimate fighter, not the ultimate lover. And like Jason Bourne, who woke up one day having forgotten his identity, the Bond series acquired a selective amnesia that erased whole areas of the franchise. Gone were Bond's double-entendre jokes, his easy connoisseurship, the suggestion that life was a game in which he luckily held the high cards. Now it's kill or be killed. The evils of the world are too daunting to be met with a smirk.
Craig's Bond, already a noble thug in Casino, has a deeper reason for moodiness here: the love of his life has just died. Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) was a British Treasury agent whose motives Bond misinterpreted, leading to her selfless suicide. Quantum, the first true sequel in the series, begins an hour after Casino ended. Bond wins a frantic car chase, and in his trunk is a prize for his MI6 boss, M (Judi Dench): a board member of the outlaw cartel once known as SPECTRE, now called Quantum. Instantly, Bond is running in all directions: pursuing and eluding a Quantum biggie named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), hooking up with Bolivian siren Camille (Olga Kurylenko) and riding his own obsession to avenge Vesper's death.
Bond Villains, Bond GirlsFleming divided his supervillains into two categories: the bon vivant industrialists whose good cheer hid wicked intentions, and the sneering, solitary madmen plotting universal suffering like a sick nerd in his basement. They were alike though in being chatty brainiac-megalomaniacs whose compulsion to explain exactly how they were going to kill Bond (and take over the world) gave him enough time to kill them. Although the novels and the early Bond movies took place during the Cold War, their villains were rarely Soviet operatives; they were closer to those freelance fruitcakes of pulp fantasy fiction, Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless. Issuing dreadful warnings, plotting mass destruction from remote redoubts and sending their thugs to do the dirty work, the Scaramangas and Ernst Stavro Blofelds of Bond fiction could have been the secular antecedents of Osama bin Laden.
That kind of bad guy is no joke these days, so screenwriters Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade pick their Quantum villain from Column A. Greene is a zillionaire tycoon who uses environmental philanthropy to mask his plan to divert water from the peasants of South America. (Bolivia is the new Chinatown.) Amalric, the French actor often seen in harried, sympathetic roles like the paralyzed writer in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is effectively reptilian here, his whispers tinged with menace, his smile hinting at sadism.
We cotton to his motives early on, when he passes Camille, a former plaything, over to Bolivian strongman General Medrano (Joaquín Cosio). Turns out Camille, like Bond, has a score to settle: she has lost her mother and daughter to Medrano's depredations. This time, for both of them, it's personal; hero and heroine percolate silently, sulfurously, with vengeance scenarios that may somehow intersect. Kurylenko, a lovely Russian-Ukrainian hybrid who is oddly duskied up to look vaguely Latina, does an exemplary job raising the movie's temperature and luring Bond out of his shell.
That's tough work, since Craig, appealingly sturdy in Casino, is near mute here: a cyber- or cipher-Bond with a loyalty chip implanted in a mechanism that's built for murderous ingenuity. "If you could avoid killing every possible lead," M tells him, "it would be deeply appreciated." As played by Dench with a nice mix of the brusque and the maternal, M must be more than Bond's superior; she is his enabler, protector and shrink. Yet Craig's Bond isn't given to soul-searching. He's a brute acting on instinct: Rambo of Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Well, an action figure, real or plastic, is just what this brisk exercise (the shortest Bond film ever) needs. Director Marc Forster--whose résumé includes a lot of gimmicky art-house fare, from Finding Neverland to The Kite Runner--does much better when he has no moral in tow; he can concentrate on shepherding the second-unit stunt work and setting a tempo of nearly nonstop suspense. What's lost in reverberations from the series' blithe old movies is gained in daredevil vigor.
So don't sit shivah over that anachronistic 007. Just enjoy a pulverizing action-adventure film whose hero happens to be named Jason Bourne--sorry, James Bond.
