A Spying Shame, Quantum of Solace is a dull and uninvolving outing for James Bond. (he gives it 1 Star).
Following Casino Royale- a film that managed to be supremely enjoyable while boldly rebooting Bond for the 21st Century- was never going to be easy. Yet it is hard to describe the level of disappointment that Quantum of Solace has managed to engender (in this reviewer at least). Squandering all the former film's energy, charm and complex character work, director Forster and his three screenwriters, as well as an agonisingly dull turn from star Craig, have mistaken motion for action, convolution for intrigue and pouty intransigence for mood.
The mess begins with a meaningless car-chase opener. All jagged jump-cuts, it conveys nothing more than the fact Bond can drive fast (note: the action throughout this movie is particularly uninvolving, like a poor episode of the A-Team that has been tarted up with a $200 million budget). Soon and via a single laundered banknote from Casino Royale's Le Chiffre, Bond is off to Haiti, Austria and Bolivia, hot on the trail of the pseudo environmentalist
global megalomaniac Dominic Greene. The latter must surely go down as the most ineffective villain in Bond history. Greene plans to take control of Bolivia's water supply, to run their water companies and, get this, to charge very high prices! Which is, of course all very Austin Powers, and certainly not worthy of a franchise that, at it's best, never confuses the fantastical with the credible.And this is perhaps the fatal flaw of Quantum of Solace - it presumes that injecting Bond with reality is good enough in itself. And that having a glum gadgetless and humourless hero who faces up to duplicitous governments can create a frisson of excitement to compensate for the fact that the entire franchise, in one egrigious film, has gone completely off the rails.
