With Craig in the role of Ian Fleming’s cold-eyed sociopath, the Bond films have become watchable for reasons other than bad puns and high skin-count. He’s brought a dangerous charm and an edge of real violence to the part. Whether that’s a good thing depends on how convincing you like your post-Imperial fantasies.
Retro Chic?
Quantum of Solace doesn’t continue the standard set by Craig’s previous outing in Casino Royale. The plot has slipped back into the kind of super-villain, Masters of the Universe, international conspiracy territory which a Bond movie can’t afford – not these days when it’s being squeezed on one side by the Jason Bourne movies, and on the other by the TV series such as Spooks. The central conceit is quite witty – that the world is busy fighting and selling its soul for oil, when the real liquid gold of the coming century will be water. But this idea is simply slotted into a plot structure so old that one felt we’d only narrowly escaped a few scenes in an Underground Lair during the final act. (In the end we had to make do with the world’s most explosion-prone hotel, a place which would have curtailed The Shining to a briefly unsettling short story.)
“I can’t find the...stationery.”
There are some striking moments in the film – aside from the actions sequences, which are superb in their own right. Judi Dench is always mesmerising, but watching M giving orders whilst rubbing in cold cream provides an image which pulled Bond movies one step closer to realism. The murder of a consular official whom Bond has seduced is offered as a critique of the audience’s easy acceptance of all the similar cases in the franchise’ history. The girl’s body was arranged as a visual parallel with a scene in Goldfinger, equating oil with gold as well as giving a momentary chance to question the values of the genre. For a moment at least. In fact in retrospect, the laughable ease with which Bond accomplishes her as a conquest has a touch of parody about it.
Attention Deficit Direction
But these moments of involvement never join up into any larger movement. The action sequences are brilliant, but they can’t carry the film on their own, and the constant flickering camera-work lead to a real sense of overload, as it passed from edgy, through unsettling into just plain irritating. The more you want to shout at a movie “Just stop jigging about and tell me whatever it is you’ve got to say!” the older and crabbier you feel, and the less receptive to appreciating an explosion-fest like QoS.
Quantum of Solace has an awful lot going for it. It’s probably unfair that it is judged by the glimpses of something better which can be seen amidst the torrents of beat ‘em up, shoot ‘em up and chase ‘em round. But as Dr. Johnson said, I paid for popcorn on top of the ticket price, and I’ve got a right to grumble. Or something along those lines.
Jem Bloomfield - Jem Bloomfield was educated at the universities of Oxford and Exeter, and is currently working on a PhD on Webster's revenge tragedy "The ...
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