33 replies to this topic

[Harmsway]

This "high class" review echoes many of my own thoughts.

[DaveBond21]

The main point I agree with is the fact that Medrano would have made a better main villain, and that Greg Beam was introducted and demoted within one movie. It might have been interesting to have seen him again.

As Bond says at the end of the movie "Well, then the right people kept their jobs"....and he could easily added..."and so soon!"

[Gustav Graves]

Not sure if anyone's read this dvd times review, but compared to most others out there it's rational and generally rates the film on it's own merits and shortfalls (rather than in the winder context of the Bond series), while being congruent to my own view on the film.

http://www.dvdtimes....-of-solace.html

"There’s a very curious moment about two-thirds of the way through Quantum of Solace, one which neatly sums up the film’s main problem. (If you haven’t seen QoS yet this constitutes a spoiler so be warned, although frankly if you don’t see it coming you’ve never seen a 007 film before and I would urge you not to begin your journey with this particular instalment.) Bond returns to his hotel room to find his contact and latest conquest Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton) dead, killed by the sinister agents of Quantum who, obviously closet fan boys, have despatched her in an extremely similar way to Shirley Eaton’s famous demise in Goldfinger only using oil rather than gold to finish her off. The odd thing is not that it happens but more how director Marc Forster shoots the scene: he doesn't focus on the body at all, putting it on the edge of frame or blurred in the background, and only giving us the quickest glimpse of it as we fade into the next scene. Quite why he does it in such a visually awkward manner is unclear, but unconsciously it sends the message that he isn't especially interested in such spectacles, not realising that for many fans the spectacle is what Bond films are all about. Time and again, similar choices are made throughout the movie, constantly playing down traditional 007 elements in favour of a more serious and grounded spy thriller, with the result that we end up with a film caught between two slightly different stools and satisfying no one. After the success of Casino Royale it’s unsurprising that all those involved wanted to continue down its road of reinvention, but too often QoS goes too far, with the result that we end up with the impression of a Bond which wants to look away from the bed completely and only grudgingly gives it a glance because it feels like it has to – in short, this is a Bond which doesn’t want to be a Bond at all.

Although structured to be essentially Casino Royale: Part Two, complaints that if one doesn't watch CR first it's difficult to follow are exaggerated: as long as one doesn’t care about missing the odd reference, it’s still perfectly easy to comprehend that Bond is after revenge for the murder of his lover and leave it at that. His quest leads him to discover that the organisation responsible for her death is the SPECTRE-like Quantum, a worldwide outfit which has its fingers in a lot of pies and operatives who have infiltrated the highest levels of many government organisations - including, as M discovers to her cost when one shoots her, on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Their connections mean that many of their activities are unofficially endorsed by countries clueless to their real aims; when Bond begins pursuing Quantum bigwig Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) and his plans to bring about a coup in Bolivia, the CIA itself tell him to back off, the US government believing that said coup will remove one of those troublesome South American dictators who are always causing trouble and net them a tidy profit in new trade agreements into the bargain. Unwilling to let go of the man who might be the key to Vesper’s fate, Bond goes rogue, teaming up with Bolivian secret agent Camille (Olga Kurylenko), who is similarly after revenge, in her case against General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio), the man who raped and murdered her mother and sister when she was a little girl and who just happens to be the army general Quantum plan to install as Bolivia’s new puppet ruler. As the pair travel to the parched landscapes of the South American country, they discover Greene’s real motivation for sponsoring the coup: he plans to secure 60% of the sun-dried country’s water supplies and blackmail the new president into giving Quantum sole distribution rights. In these ecologically tense times, water is the new oil, and a man called Greene is determined to control it.

On the face of it, that synopsis makes QoS sound fairly typical. All the ingredients are there: an international terrorist organisation with a mad plan for domination, a female sidekick with a personal vendetta against the bad guys, a collection of exotic locations (in addition to Bolivia 007’s travels take to him to Italy, Haiti, Austria and Russia) and M watching from the sidelines and tutting at her agent’s unorthodox methods. But the treatment is half-hearted bordering on lazy at times, with, despite the many set pieces, a languorous pace and underdeveloped characters. Despite Kurylenko giving a committed, strong performance (with a better role she could have become one of the great Bond girls) her character is nothing more than a rehash of the likes of Domino, Anya or Melina from For Your Eyes Only, with nothing to distinguish her quest from vengeance from those earlier. Quantum itself is a nebulous organisation – despite one effective scene in which Bond infiltrates their covert meeting at an opera house, they are ill-defined, an all-purpose global conspiracy which can be fitted to whatever requirements the story needs. Despite their widespread tentacles, they certainly don't have the same air of menace as SPECTRE did, not least because any group that chooses to employ Dominic Greene as a frontman is more likely to inspire pity rather than terror. Amalric's character is without doubt one of the weakest villains Bond has ever faced, an anodyne figure with zero charisma who poses all the threat of a bowler hat with its steel rim removed. He’s the baddy the other baddies give a wedgie to and stick his head down the toilet, so monumentally ineffective that whenever he runs into Bond all he can do is freeze like a deer caught in the headlights and adopt an expression that suggests nothing more than a bad case of trapped wind. He can't even handle simple tasks like pushing girls off balconies, and chooses for a henchman a somewhat camp-looking individual who literally does nothing the entire film other than leer in a fey manner and fall down some stairs. For a story that was purported to be about Bond’s vigilante-like quest for personal revenge after the murder of his beloved, we needed a suitably egregious target, rather than one who inspires nothing more than apathy on the part of both the viewer and, it seems, Bond, who in the end doesn't even bother to kill him.

It's clear that Forster and writer Paul Haggis's hearts just aren't in the job. Instead, they are far more interested in lending the film some kind of commentary on the current geopolitical landscape, in which western governments knowingly make deals with shady associates, economic pragmatism trumps black and white morality every time and only Bond stands between Britain's fine name and total moral decay. The environmental angle is poorly developed and, as Eamonn accurately noted in his cinema review, feels exploitative, but the overriding portrait of the conflicting factors affecting the West is not unconvincing, even if at times one feels that the outrage on display is a little artificial. One of the things the Brosnan era struggled and finally failed to do was place Bond in a wider political context, which is one of the reasons his films, post Goldeneye, feel more shallow than those of the Sixties and Seventies. QoS's primary success is in once again establishing a global backdrop for Bond's adventures. It's no coincidence that while the principal characters, with the exception of Bond himself, aren't up to scratch, a couple of the background players, representing this backdrop, are invested with far more personality. The oleaginous Medrano, for example, would have made for a far more enjoyably nasty adversary than Greene; similarly, while poor old Felix Leiter is relegated to little more than a plot device, his smarmy CIA associate (who, for one joyous moment early on, sounds like he’s called Mr Bean) is a memorably sly character, one who will hopefully crop up again in a future episode.

The one point where this different focus really benefits the film is in the figure of Bond himself. Irrespective of his grief for Vesper, which aside from giving him motivation doesn’t actually get that much of an airing, the actor has found an interpretation very different from his predecessors yet which is still somehow quintessentially Bond. The cold-blooded assassin, last seen roughly in the mid-Sixties, is back, whether he’s twisting a knife into one unfortunate’s femoral artery and waiting for him to bleed out or knocking someone off the roof of an opera house the second he refuses to talk. This is an impatient secret agent, curtly cutting people off with a dismissive “No,” when what they are saying has no relevance, in the same way that he repeatedly chucks away weapons or other implements the moment their usefulness has ended. Continuing on the theme of CR, he has emotional believability – his redemption at the end of the film, in which he doesn’t kill the man who set Vesper up, is automatic, but earlier his relationship with Camille is well drawn, whether he’s apologising to her for stopping her killing the General or, in the film’s climax, comforting her as she quakes beneath the flames of the burning hotel. One suspects that the otherwise extremely lacklustre climax was created solely for this sequence, which makes it a bit of a shame that it is something of a retread of the shower scene in CR, but nevertheless it adds to our knowledge of this man, and as such is worth something. He’s also got a subtly differently sense of humour – there are no Connery or Moore-like quips (and he does have opportunities, such as when he hands the unconscious Camille over following the boat chase) but instead he has a far more wry outlook. “That wasn’t very nice,” he says after being shot at, while his reaction to Fields’s suggested hideout, and his subsequent rewriting of their cover story in a far more luxuriant hotel, is greatly amusing. In fairness we are now very far from Fleming’s Bond, but the character, and Craig's intelligent performance, makes him an intriguing, three-dimensional figure, arguably far more so than any of his five predecessors.

Indeed, the only aspect of Bond that I’m not so certain about is what is developing into an uncomfortably maternal relationship with M. Practically the first thing she does in the film is tell him he looks terrible and ask how long it’s been since he slept, and later on when Camille refers to her as his mother he says “She likes to think so.” Hmm. M has more screentime in this one than in the last couple, popping up in what feels like every other scene, and on a practical note it makes no sense having the head of MI6 flying around after her recalcitrant agent, even if she is feeling a bit mumsy towards him. But the relationship, while believable and well played between two actors who have a good chemistry, is inappropriate, exemplified by the moment when M allows Bond to escape from her own agents - a conflict of interest which would very soon get her fired. Way back in Goldeneye she very smartly informed Brosnan's 007 that she had no compunction about sending him to his death - suddenly, it's become significantly harder to believe that.

It's a slight misjudgement, one which betrays a certain lack of understanding of M's place in Bond's world, and it's by no means the only one. The biggest, though, is that QoS just isn't fun enough. While the basic story of Bond's evolution into the cold-hearted killer was never going to be a Moore-like flippant romp, it should have still have been possible to make the journey a little less serious. 007 usually live in a world of heightened reality, and at least one scene per film should have the audience exclaiming “That’s absurd – hooray!” while Barry’s theme triumphantly blares in the background. QoS doesn’t have that. Instead we get a series of mechanical action sequences, none of which are memorable – the boat chase pales before those in Live and Let Die and The World is Not Enough, the rooftop chase not unlike that in The Living Daylights, there’s a dogfight which, if you’ll forgive the pun, never takes off - which substitute toughness for style. The climax, as mentioned, is a big flop and over far too quickly, while the opening sequence, in which we are plunged straight into a car chase, fails to appreciate that Bond's presence alone does not make such a sequence exciting - without knowing what's at stake the thrills are removed, and all for the sake of a not-especially-funny punchline. While the fact that this is perhaps the first film in the franchise’s history in which our man doesn’t end up with his leading lady is forgivable in the circumstances, the perfunctory way in which Fields jumps into bed with him, with none of the usual flirty resistance (almost as though she’s been briefed by head office as to what is expected of her) once again demonstrates a lack of interest in Bond staples. The whole is a bit like a robot who has been programmed to act like a human, dispassionately going through the mechanics of the thing without ever really knowing why it is doing so.

When the title was first announced, there were rumblings that it was a bit rubbish and didn’t have that familiar ring about it. This isn’t true – it’s far more “authentic” than any of the Brosnan titles or Licence to Kill and the irony is that in the end the title is one of the most traditional things about the entire film. Disregarding Forster’s personal preferences for a moment, the major mistake made is that it fundamentally doesn’t seem to understand quite why Casino Royale was the success it was. It wasn’t that CR changed the formula – with its kinetic stunts (the free-running, the car tumble), exotic locations, casino games, idiosyncratic baddy and, in the form of the device which Bond brings himself back from the dead with, unlikely gadgets, it conformed to the Bond formula just as much as any other of the films, its success coming from the fact that it was able to find a new way to jig those elements and make them seem fresh once again. It reinvented, rather than changed. QoS, on the other hand, wants to go its own way, resulting in a film which is forever trying to pull away from everything that defines what the Bond franchise is, resulting in an unsatisfying mishmash. At the final reckoning, it never comes close to realising that, if you don't focus directly on the dead body drowned in oil on the bed, you're kind of missing the whole point.

Ever since Roger Moore, every incumbent in the role of 007 has followed up a superb debut with a deeply disappointing follow-up (okay, Live and Let Die isn't a classic, but it is significantly better than the films on either side of it, and Moore gives arguably his best performance in the role.) Now Daniel Craig follows suit, in a film which is in danger of throwing out the Bond with the bathwater. It's only fitting then, that we get an equally lacklustre disc - there's some good stuff on it, but not nearly enough. I guess we'll just have to wait until The Hildebrand Rarity appears in cinemas in a couple of years' time to get the full picture."

I was reading this review, and compared it with my one:

Ian Fleming's Bond vs. Broccoli's/Wilson's Bond
by Gustav Graves (Gert Jan Waterink)

It was the scene between the Foreign Secretary and ‘M’ that basically summarizes the secondary theme of the film: Villains are not any longer persons with black character treats. They are persons whose personalities have many shades of grey. Dominic Greene is off course the villain, but he’s also an eco-philanthropist. James Bond on the other hand should be the positive action-hero, but instead kills more people than Dominic Greene does! The theme is furthermore highlighted by scenes of very poor Bolivian people who are literally dying to get some water. David Arnold’s unoriginal Babel-like music stresses this fact as well.

Then there is the post-Bush CIA who cannot wait to see the current Bolivian government thrown overboard by Greene and Co. And MI6 meanwhile has become an incompetent secret service with so many leaks in its organization that it’s almost a not-so-secret service.

Lot of this is off course quite realistic in the real world. Both Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson know how the world has changed since 9/11. The outgoing US government, the CIA, MI6: Ethics seem not so important anymore for them. Many films produced after 9/11 have had similar themes about the founding’s of terrorism. One can think of ‘Syriana’, ‘Lions For Lambs’, ‘United 93’ and more recently ‘The Kite Runner’. Also the Bourne films show us this criticism when the CIA wants to adopt operation ‘Threadstone’, no matter how bleak this will turn out for certain US citizens.

It is exactly the leading character from the Bourne franchise who perfectly succeeded at showing us the bleaker and greyer world of foreign politics and intelligence agencies.

But should Ian Fleming’s character James Bond be used in the same way as Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne? It is true that since the start of the franchise in 1962 James Bond was more or less the same character. At times he was a bit darker and a bit grittier, but still a suave British spy. This was the case in ‘The Living Daylights’,‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, ‘From Russia With Love’ and indeed ‘Casino Royale’. But at times Bond also proved to be a funny Brit as well. ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’, ‘Moonraker’ and ‘Live And Let Die’ are good examples of such a Bond.

With ‘Quantum Of Solace’ however, the Bond producers did go too far in their ambition to set a new Bond-standard. Whereas ‘Casino Royale’ was, is and will be an instant classic in the future, the producers decided to go one step further in making Bond a villainous, bad- assassin using his fists instead of his high IQ. It was totally unnecessary.

Bond has always been a suave British agent, who only kills for Queen and Country if he needs to. But even in Fleming’s first Bond novel he never threw a dead friend -René Mathis- in a dustbin. His Cambridge past would prevent him from adopting such disrespectful Jason Bourne-like acts. In Fleming’s first Bond novel he’s already quite a cool spy and never puts the British Secret Service in danger. But in ‘Quantum Of Solace’ MI6 has become an incompetent unbelievable detective agency. I would advice PM Brown to cut down money on Broccoli's and Wilson's version of MI6.

All other aspects in Bond’s latest instalment are there, but also quite blunted if I may say. Bond girl Camille is again a vengeful, kung-fu-like man girl who has been written as Bond’s equal. It has been done before (Wai Lin, Jinx Jordan). But where are the real Bond girls who are not afraid of showing their feminine side? I do miss the Tracy’s, Pussy’s, Honey’s and Vesper’s of the Bond-franchise.

While ‘Quantum Of Solace’ lacks plot and a good developing storyline --It’s one of the biggest weaknesses of the film. ‘Quantum Of Solace’ is depending way too much on ‘Casino Royale’s’ storyline and adds a disproportional number of Bourne-like edited action sequences to it.-- the new crime syndicate QUANTUM could be a good starting point for the next Bond flick. Mr White is, luckily, still alive and he could easily be this century’s Ernst Blofeld.

Unfortunately, ‘Quantum Of Solace’ will not be an instant classic in the near future. Film fans will always see this film as a trend follower, not a trend setter. And that’s its biggest weakness. Bond films should be trend setters again, THE example for all other action-thriller franchises. James Bond will, hopefully, return in a real Fleming-thriller, not a Ludlum-thriller.

Rating as a James Bond film: 5.5/10.0
Rating as a general action thriller: 6.5/10

And I was flabbergasted to see how much he and me thought quite similar about the latest Bond film. So yes, I wholeheartedly agree with him. There's nothing more I can add to the review this topic opened with. Well said!

[Gustav Graves]

Not sure if anyone's read this dvd times review, but compared to most others out there it's rational and generally rates the film on it's own merits and shortfalls (rather than in the winder context of the Bond series), while being congruent to my own view on the film.

http://www.dvdtimes....-of-solace.html

"There’s a very curious moment about two-thirds of the way through Quantum of Solace, one which neatly sums up the film’s main problem. (If you haven’t seen QoS yet this constitutes a spoiler so be warned, although frankly if you don’t see it coming you’ve never seen a 007 film before and I would urge you not to begin your journey with this particular instalment.) Bond returns to his hotel room to find his contact and latest conquest Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton) dead, killed by the sinister agents of Quantum who, obviously closet fan boys, have despatched her in an extremely similar way to Shirley Eaton’s famous demise in Goldfinger only using oil rather than gold to finish her off. The odd thing is not that it happens but more how director Marc Forster shoots the scene: he doesn't focus on the body at all, putting it on the edge of frame or blurred in the background, and only giving us the quickest glimpse of it as we fade into the next scene. Quite why he does it in such a visually awkward manner is unclear, but unconsciously it sends the message that he isn't especially interested in such spectacles, not realising that for many fans the spectacle is what Bond films are all about. Time and again, similar choices are made throughout the movie, constantly playing down traditional 007 elements in favour of a more serious and grounded spy thriller, with the result that we end up with a film caught between two slightly different stools and satisfying no one. After the success of Casino Royale it’s unsurprising that all those involved wanted to continue down its road of reinvention, but too often QoS goes too far, with the result that we end up with the impression of a Bond which wants to look away from the bed completely and only grudgingly gives it a glance because it feels like it has to – in short, this is a Bond which doesn’t want to be a Bond at all.

Although structured to be essentially Casino Royale: Part Two, complaints that if one doesn't watch CR first it's difficult to follow are exaggerated: as long as one doesn’t care about missing the odd reference, it’s still perfectly easy to comprehend that Bond is after revenge for the murder of his lover and leave it at that. His quest leads him to discover that the organisation responsible for her death is the SPECTRE-like Quantum, a worldwide outfit which has its fingers in a lot of pies and operatives who have infiltrated the highest levels of many government organisations - including, as M discovers to her cost when one shoots her, on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Their connections mean that many of their activities are unofficially endorsed by countries clueless to their real aims; when Bond begins pursuing Quantum bigwig Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) and his plans to bring about a coup in Bolivia, the CIA itself tell him to back off, the US government believing that said coup will remove one of those troublesome South American dictators who are always causing trouble and net them a tidy profit in new trade agreements into the bargain. Unwilling to let go of the man who might be the key to Vesper’s fate, Bond goes rogue, teaming up with Bolivian secret agent Camille (Olga Kurylenko), who is similarly after revenge, in her case against General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio), the man who raped and murdered her mother and sister when she was a little girl and who just happens to be the army general Quantum plan to install as Bolivia’s new puppet ruler. As the pair travel to the parched landscapes of the South American country, they discover Greene’s real motivation for sponsoring the coup: he plans to secure 60% of the sun-dried country’s water supplies and blackmail the new president into giving Quantum sole distribution rights. In these ecologically tense times, water is the new oil, and a man called Greene is determined to control it.

On the face of it, that synopsis makes QoS sound fairly typical. All the ingredients are there: an international terrorist organisation with a mad plan for domination, a female sidekick with a personal vendetta against the bad guys, a collection of exotic locations (in addition to Bolivia 007’s travels take to him to Italy, Haiti, Austria and Russia) and M watching from the sidelines and tutting at her agent’s unorthodox methods. But the treatment is half-hearted bordering on lazy at times, with, despite the many set pieces, a languorous pace and underdeveloped characters. Despite Kurylenko giving a committed, strong performance (with a better role she could have become one of the great Bond girls) her character is nothing more than a rehash of the likes of Domino, Anya or Melina from For Your Eyes Only, with nothing to distinguish her quest from vengeance from those earlier. Quantum itself is a nebulous organisation – despite one effective scene in which Bond infiltrates their covert meeting at an opera house, they are ill-defined, an all-purpose global conspiracy which can be fitted to whatever requirements the story needs. Despite their widespread tentacles, they certainly don't have the same air of menace as SPECTRE did, not least because any group that chooses to employ Dominic Greene as a frontman is more likely to inspire pity rather than terror. Amalric's character is without doubt one of the weakest villains Bond has ever faced, an anodyne figure with zero charisma who poses all the threat of a bowler hat with its steel rim removed. He’s the baddy the other baddies give a wedgie to and stick his head down the toilet, so monumentally ineffective that whenever he runs into Bond all he can do is freeze like a deer caught in the headlights and adopt an expression that suggests nothing more than a bad case of trapped wind. He can't even handle simple tasks like pushing girls off balconies, and chooses for a henchman a somewhat camp-looking individual who literally does nothing the entire film other than leer in a fey manner and fall down some stairs. For a story that was purported to be about Bond’s vigilante-like quest for personal revenge after the murder of his beloved, we needed a suitably egregious target, rather than one who inspires nothing more than apathy on the part of both the viewer and, it seems, Bond, who in the end doesn't even bother to kill him.

It's clear that Forster and writer Paul Haggis's hearts just aren't in the job. Instead, they are far more interested in lending the film some kind of commentary on the current geopolitical landscape, in which western governments knowingly make deals with shady associates, economic pragmatism trumps black and white morality every time and only Bond stands between Britain's fine name and total moral decay. The environmental angle is poorly developed and, as Eamonn accurately noted in his cinema review, feels exploitative, but the overriding portrait of the conflicting factors affecting the West is not unconvincing, even if at times one feels that the outrage on display is a little artificial. One of the things the Brosnan era struggled and finally failed to do was place Bond in a wider political context, which is one of the reasons his films, post Goldeneye, feel more shallow than those of the Sixties and Seventies. QoS's primary success is in once again establishing a global backdrop for Bond's adventures. It's no coincidence that while the principal characters, with the exception of Bond himself, aren't up to scratch, a couple of the background players, representing this backdrop, are invested with far more personality. The oleaginous Medrano, for example, would have made for a far more enjoyably nasty adversary than Greene; similarly, while poor old Felix Leiter is relegated to little more than a plot device, his smarmy CIA associate (who, for one joyous moment early on, sounds like he’s called Mr Bean) is a memorably sly character, one who will hopefully crop up again in a future episode.

The one point where this different focus really benefits the film is in the figure of Bond himself. Irrespective of his grief for Vesper, which aside from giving him motivation doesn’t actually get that much of an airing, the actor has found an interpretation very different from his predecessors yet which is still somehow quintessentially Bond. The cold-blooded assassin, last seen roughly in the mid-Sixties, is back, whether he’s twisting a knife into one unfortunate’s femoral artery and waiting for him to bleed out or knocking someone off the roof of an opera house the second he refuses to talk. This is an impatient secret agent, curtly cutting people off with a dismissive “No,” when what they are saying has no relevance, in the same way that he repeatedly chucks away weapons or other implements the moment their usefulness has ended. Continuing on the theme of CR, he has emotional believability – his redemption at the end of the film, in which he doesn’t kill the man who set Vesper up, is automatic, but earlier his relationship with Camille is well drawn, whether he’s apologising to her for stopping her killing the General or, in the film’s climax, comforting her as she quakes beneath the flames of the burning hotel. One suspects that the otherwise extremely lacklustre climax was created solely for this sequence, which makes it a bit of a shame that it is something of a retread of the shower scene in CR, but nevertheless it adds to our knowledge of this man, and as such is worth something. He’s also got a subtly differently sense of humour – there are no Connery or Moore-like quips (and he does have opportunities, such as when he hands the unconscious Camille over following the boat chase) but instead he has a far more wry outlook. “That wasn’t very nice,” he says after being shot at, while his reaction to Fields’s suggested hideout, and his subsequent rewriting of their cover story in a far more luxuriant hotel, is greatly amusing. In fairness we are now very far from Fleming’s Bond, but the character, and Craig's intelligent performance, makes him an intriguing, three-dimensional figure, arguably far more so than any of his five predecessors.

Indeed, the only aspect of Bond that I’m not so certain about is what is developing into an uncomfortably maternal relationship with M. Practically the first thing she does in the film is tell him he looks terrible and ask how long it’s been since he slept, and later on when Camille refers to her as his mother he says “She likes to think so.” Hmm. M has more screentime in this one than in the last couple, popping up in what feels like every other scene, and on a practical note it makes no sense having the head of MI6 flying around after her recalcitrant agent, even if she is feeling a bit mumsy towards him. But the relationship, while believable and well played between two actors who have a good chemistry, is inappropriate, exemplified by the moment when M allows Bond to escape from her own agents - a conflict of interest which would very soon get her fired. Way back in Goldeneye she very smartly informed Brosnan's 007 that she had no compunction about sending him to his death - suddenly, it's become significantly harder to believe that.

It's a slight misjudgement, one which betrays a certain lack of understanding of M's place in Bond's world, and it's by no means the only one. The biggest, though, is that QoS just isn't fun enough. While the basic story of Bond's evolution into the cold-hearted killer was never going to be a Moore-like flippant romp, it should have still have been possible to make the journey a little less serious. 007 usually live in a world of heightened reality, and at least one scene per film should have the audience exclaiming “That’s absurd – hooray!” while Barry’s theme triumphantly blares in the background. QoS doesn’t have that. Instead we get a series of mechanical action sequences, none of which are memorable – the boat chase pales before those in Live and Let Die and The World is Not Enough, the rooftop chase not unlike that in The Living Daylights, there’s a dogfight which, if you’ll forgive the pun, never takes off - which substitute toughness for style. The climax, as mentioned, is a big flop and over far too quickly, while the opening sequence, in which we are plunged straight into a car chase, fails to appreciate that Bond's presence alone does not make such a sequence exciting - without knowing what's at stake the thrills are removed, and all for the sake of a not-especially-funny punchline. While the fact that this is perhaps the first film in the franchise’s history in which our man doesn’t end up with his leading lady is forgivable in the circumstances, the perfunctory way in which Fields jumps into bed with him, with none of the usual flirty resistance (almost as though she’s been briefed by head office as to what is expected of her) once again demonstrates a lack of interest in Bond staples. The whole is a bit like a robot who has been programmed to act like a human, dispassionately going through the mechanics of the thing without ever really knowing why it is doing so.

When the title was first announced, there were rumblings that it was a bit rubbish and didn’t have that familiar ring about it. This isn’t true – it’s far more “authentic” than any of the Brosnan titles or Licence to Kill and the irony is that in the end the title is one of the most traditional things about the entire film. Disregarding Forster’s personal preferences for a moment, the major mistake made is that it fundamentally doesn’t seem to understand quite why Casino Royale was the success it was. It wasn’t that CR changed the formula – with its kinetic stunts (the free-running, the car tumble), exotic locations, casino games, idiosyncratic baddy and, in the form of the device which Bond brings himself back from the dead with, unlikely gadgets, it conformed to the Bond formula just as much as any other of the films, its success coming from the fact that it was able to find a new way to jig those elements and make them seem fresh once again. It reinvented, rather than changed. QoS, on the other hand, wants to go its own way, resulting in a film which is forever trying to pull away from everything that defines what the Bond franchise is, resulting in an unsatisfying mishmash. At the final reckoning, it never comes close to realising that, if you don't focus directly on the dead body drowned in oil on the bed, you're kind of missing the whole point.

Ever since Roger Moore, every incumbent in the role of 007 has followed up a superb debut with a deeply disappointing follow-up (okay, Live and Let Die isn't a classic, but it is significantly better than the films on either side of it, and Moore gives arguably his best performance in the role.) Now Daniel Craig follows suit, in a film which is in danger of throwing out the Bond with the bathwater. It's only fitting then, that we get an equally lacklustre disc - there's some good stuff on it, but not nearly enough. I guess we'll just have to wait until The Hildebrand Rarity appears in cinemas in a couple of years' time to get the full picture."

I was reading this review, and compared it with my one:

Ian Fleming's Bond vs. Broccoli's/Wilson's Bond
by Gustav Graves (Gert Jan Waterink)

It was the scene between the Foreign Secretary and ‘M’ that basically summarizes the secondary theme of the film: Villains are not any longer persons with black character treats. They are persons whose personalities have many shades of grey. Dominic Greene is off course the villain, but he’s also an eco-philanthropist. James Bond on the other hand should be the positive action-hero, but instead kills more people than Dominic Greene does! The theme is furthermore highlighted by scenes of very poor Bolivian people who are literally dying to get some water. David Arnold’s unoriginal Babel-like music stresses this fact as well.

Then there is the post-Bush CIA who cannot wait to see the current Bolivian government thrown overboard by Greene and Co. And MI6 meanwhile has become an incompetent secret service with so many leaks in its organization that it’s almost a not-so-secret service.

Lot of this is off course quite realistic in the real world. Both Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson know how the world has changed since 9/11. The outgoing US government, the CIA, MI6: Ethics seem not so important anymore for them. Many films produced after 9/11 have had similar themes about the founding’s of terrorism. One can think of ‘Syriana’, ‘Lions For Lambs’, ‘United 93’ and more recently ‘The Kite Runner’. Also the Bourne films show us this criticism when the CIA wants to adopt operation ‘Threadstone’, no matter how bleak this will turn out for certain US citizens.

It is exactly the leading character from the Bourne franchise who perfectly succeeded at showing us the bleaker and greyer world of foreign politics and intelligence agencies.

But should Ian Fleming’s character James Bond be used in the same way as Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne? It is true that since the start of the franchise in 1962 James Bond was more or less the same character. At times he was a bit darker and a bit grittier, but still a suave British spy. This was the case in ‘The Living Daylights’,‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, ‘From Russia With Love’ and indeed ‘Casino Royale’. But at times Bond also proved to be a funny Brit as well. ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’, ‘Moonraker’ and ‘Live And Let Die’ are good examples of such a Bond.

With ‘Quantum Of Solace’ however, the Bond producers did go too far in their ambition to set a new Bond-standard. Whereas ‘Casino Royale’ was, is and will be an instant classic in the future, the producers decided to go one step further in making Bond a villainous, bad- assassin using his fists instead of his high IQ. It was totally unnecessary.

Bond has always been a suave British agent, who only kills for Queen and Country if he needs to. But even in Fleming’s first Bond novel he never threw a dead friend -René Mathis- in a dustbin. His Cambridge past would prevent him from adopting such disrespectful Jason Bourne-like acts. In Fleming’s first Bond novel he’s already quite a cool spy and never puts the British Secret Service in danger. But in ‘Quantum Of Solace’ MI6 has become an incompetent unbelievable detective agency. I would advice PM Brown to cut down money on Broccoli's and Wilson's version of MI6.

All other aspects in Bond’s latest instalment are there, but also quite blunted if I may say. Bond girl Camille is again a vengeful, kung-fu-like man girl who has been written as Bond’s equal. It has been done before (Wai Lin, Jinx Jordan). But where are the real Bond girls who are not afraid of showing their feminine side? I do miss the Tracy’s, Pussy’s, Honey’s and Vesper’s of the Bond-franchise.

While ‘Quantum Of Solace’ lacks plot and a good developing storyline --It’s one of the biggest weaknesses of the film. ‘Quantum Of Solace’ is depending way too much on ‘Casino Royale’s’ storyline and adds a disproportional number of Bourne-like edited action sequences to it.-- the new crime syndicate QUANTUM could be a good starting point for the next Bond flick. Mr White is, luckily, still alive and he could easily be this century’s Ernst Blofeld.

Unfortunately, ‘Quantum Of Solace’ will not be an instant classic in the near future. Film fans will always see this film as a trend follower, not a trend setter. And that’s its biggest weakness. Bond films should be trend setters again, THE example for all other action-thriller franchises. James Bond will, hopefully, return in a real Fleming-thriller, not a Ludlum-thriller.

Rating as a James Bond film: 5.5/10.0
Rating as a general action thriller: 6.5/10

And I was flabbergasted to see how much he and me thought quite similar about the latest Bond film. So yes, I wholeheartedly agree with him. There's nothing more I can add to the review this topic opened with. Well said!