Double-O Revvin'

The first-ever Bond sequel has the shortest running time in the series, and it begins just minutes after the conclusion of Casino Royale,
the series’ longest picture. And if you’re not up to speed regarding
that movie’s character arcs beforehand, such as the reasons why the
mysterious Mr. White (played by Jesper Christensen) would be rolling
around the trunk of Bond’s Aston Martin during the movie’s opening
chase sequence, then don’t expect much Solace from this follow-up’s Mach-1 pacing.

Sand trapped: Daniel Craig and Olga Kurylenko in the new James Bond extravaganza Quantum of Solace.

Since it is a sequel to an immensely popular movie, however, Solace dispenses with the don’t-need-to-know backstories as director du jour Marc Forster (Monsters’ Ball, Finding Neverland)
concentrates on pulse-quickening action. It’s evident that Bond, awash
in broody pissiness, still isn’t over the recent passing of Vesper
Lynd, the femme fatale from Royale (photos of actress Eva Green
in the role punctuate this installment) and damn near everyone knows
it, too. Showing professional concern is M (Judi Dench, delivering her
best performance yet in the series), Bond’s superior at Britain’s
super-secret MI6 spy agency, who frets that “it’d be a pretty cold
bastard who didn’t want revenge for the death of someone he loved.” 

Meanwhile, laughing on the sidelines is White, the guy Bond shot during Royale’s finale. White is the wounded passenger inside Bond’s Aston Martin trunk during Solace’s
wing-dinger car chase through the mountainside roads of Siena, Italy.
Following that motorized mayhem, M and some other MI6ers join Bond as
they plan to interrogate/torture White to get valuable information
regarding the organization Quantum. But White has other ideas. First,
he goads 007 with snotty repartee that further damages the spy’s broken
heart: “I think you would have done anything for {Vesper}. The real
shame is that if she hadn’t killed herself, we would have had you,
too.” Then White pushes M’s buttons: “You really don’t know anything
about us. The truth is you don’t even know we exist. The first thing
you should know about us is that we have people everywhere.” 

Sure enough, the tables are instantly
turned during a hail of gunfire, as White escapes and Bond must track
down an informant during a foot chase that combines scenic diversions
(the annual Palio horse race in Siena’s center square provides a
colorful backdrop), free-running stunts along rooftops and a conclusion
involving Bond and his quarry teetering on an art gallery’s scaffolds,
a scene that some old-school movie fans might compare with Nicolas
Roeg’s 1973 Don’t Look Now. Both chases take place in the first
15 minutes, folks, and if that’s not enough excitement, then hang on
for a speedboats-vs.-machine guns battle before a half-hour has expired.

Quantum of Solace continues the in-name-only screen adaptations of works originally penned by Bond godfather Ian Fleming. Solace, a 20-odd page short story that was part of the 1960 anthology For Your Eyes Only,
has been substantially rewritten by veteran Bond scribes Neal Purvis
and Robert Wade, with a further script polish by Academy Award-winning
Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby). 

Trust, betrayal and forgiveness are the
basic themes for this go-round, in which Bond’s this-time-it’s-personal
work ethic is counterpointed by the sultry presence of Camille (Olga
Kurylenko), who has her own reasons for wanting to bump off deposed
dictator Gen. Medrano (Joaquin Cosio). Camille and Medrano are both
connected to the villain Bond is also pursuing: Dominic Greene (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s
Mathieu Amalric, here looking a little Roman Polanski-ish), the
bazillionaire philanthropist behind the enviro-minded utility company
Greene Planet, which is involved in a Chinatown-esque plot that concerns a barren desert in Bolivia. 

Entrusting the franchise to Forster, a director better known for art-house fare such as The Kite Runner,
initially seems like a wrong move. The car-chase opener, ruthlessly
edited by Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson, results in a kinetic
cavalcade of incomprehensible images that would be more at home in a Bourne Identity-styled shaker-upper, minus the sense of elegant precision found in the second-unit stunt action of other Bond flicks.  

Yet this sequel steadily improves with
every scene; even the expository sequences, usually dead weight in most
007 entries, are handled by Forster with no-nonsense urgency. Tasty
dialogue certainly aids Dench’s meaty performance as M, who opines to
Bond, “When someone says we’ve got people

everywhere, you expect it to be hyperbole. Lots of people say that.
Florists use that expression. It doesn’t mean that they’ve got somebody
working for him inside the bloody room!” 

Wordsmiths Haggis, Purvis and Wade also
take cynical swipes at all sides involved in various platforms of
foreign policy. “With you tied up in the Middle East,” Greene tells a
CIA agent, “South America is falling like dominoes. You don’t need
another Marxist giving away national resources to the people, do you?”
A Brit spymaster allows, “If we refused to do business with villains,
we’d have almost no one to trade with. Right or wrong doesn’t come into
it.” 

Meanwhile, a crooked cop in Bolivia
demands payment in euros because “the {U.S.} dollar isn’t what it once
was. The cost of war. . . ”

The movie’s most telling sign that we’re dealing with a new-age Bond is that he treats Solace’s
strongest women as equals. He doesn’t dally with Camille, since both
are consumed by vengeance, and that bedroom time is better spent
nailing the reprehensible parties. And when Bond does kill an afternoon
with a pretty agent named Fields (Gemma Arterton), the aftermath is
quite deadly, in a shocking visual that purposely recalls an earlier
Bond mission. As for Dench’s M, she gets more screen time than in all
of her previous Bond movies combined, as she barks commands with a
welcome relish (“If you could avoid killing every possible lead,” she
tells Bond, “it would be deeply appreciated.”), yet an occasional
slight smile crosses her face whenever Bond phones in some precious
intel.

In the span of just two movies, Daniel
Craig owns the 007 role, a lethally entertaining mixture of aggressive
overkill and catlike grace. Craig’s tough enough to perform many of his
own stunts, and Forster gives him maximum camera exposure. The editing
of Bond’s confrontation with Greene’s goons at an Austria opera house,
timed to the strains of Tosca, is particularly impressive,
especially the elliptical moment when Bond darts up some stairs—unaware
that Mr. White is also sitting in the audience. Yet the actor manages
subtle dramatic details in two separate moments linked by tragedy:
early on, Bond watches a shiv-toting thug experiencing his final death
throes in a Haiti hotel room, and later he comforts his old dying pal
Mathis (series returnee Giancarlo Giannini), whom he has recruited
after getting in hot water with M. 

Appropriately, Quantum of Solace ends with what usually kicks off every Bond movie: a gunsight



image of 007, now with Craig—in the shoes worn by Connery, Lazenby,
Moore, Dalton and Brosnan—taking aim at the viewer, as the screen runs
blood red and Monty Norman’s blaring theme song dominates the
soundtrack. And all is right with the world.

MGM/20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
offers a bare-bones, single-disc DVD, with the film letterboxed at
2.40:1 ratio, about four minutes devoted to the teaser trailer and the
official coming attraction, and a 4½-minute music video for Solace’s
theme song, “Another Way to Die,” a duet with Jack White and Alicia
Keys, which at least adheres to the film’s overriding theme of gender
parity. While the song does have some snappy edginess, it still doesn’t
have a good beat and you can’t dance to it, either. Then again, no Bond
song has really charted big time since Duran Duran’s “A View to a
Kill”; hell, even a-ha’s “The Living Daylights” is way catchier than
the White-Keys effort.

Bond aficionados will probably hold out for the Solace
“special edition,” with a second disc loaded with many extras. Forster
offers no commentary track but he gets plenty of props in the
25-minute, seven-part “Bond on Location” documentary that shows him
supervising various details throughout the globetrotting shoot from
January to June 2008. Five other making-of vignettes (including a nod
to David Foster’s effective score, which interpolates several
references to Monty Norman’s classic 007 theme) total about 13 minutes. 

The disc’s highlight devotes 46 minutes
to snippets of 34 behind-the-scenes players in clips that were first
earmarked for the film’s Web site consumption to stoke viewer interest.
In Panama, casting director Ana Endara enlisted some colorful extras
who had to travel by canoe for an hour, then take a bus ride to the
location; one extra initially got his cinematic icons screwed up,
confusing King Kong with James Bond, but then figured out, “That’s the
guy with lots of cars, lots of weapons and lots of women!” In Chile’s
Atacama Desert, director general Tim DeZeeuw discusses the sleek
architecture of the European Southern Observatory, which doubles as a
fuel-cell-driven high-tech hotel in Solace’s explosive finale.
And main-titles designers Ben Radatz and Tim Fisher choreograph the
softcore imagery of nude female models buried in a soundstage’s
sandbox. Hey, it’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

-Bill DeLapp