film, eyeballs, brain

In Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace, the arch-villain (can there be any other kind in a Bond film?) hisses a cliche at the Bond girl (can they be called anything else in a Bond film?): Be careful what you wish for. Though I think I’ve seen them all anyway, I’m not a big fan of the James Bond series, having never really gotten into its camp.

Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale (2006) changed my mind, featuring a Bond (played by an excellently cast Daniel Craig) that was both grimly, almost sadistically, violent and surprisingly tender at the same time. (There’s even a tense series of card games — when was the last time you saw that?) And so I wanted more of the same volatile and vulnerable Bond, although surrounded by even more explosions and bloody hand-to-hand combat. My wish, in effect, was for this James Bond to become Jason Bourne — a mistake, in retrospect.

Roman Polanski and Mackenzie Crook — oops, I meant Mathieu Amalric and Anatole Taubman — play Arch-Villain and Creepy Sidekick respectively. True to post-Cold War Bond, Amalric is no Russkie general with an eyepatch or a mad scientist holed up in a remote island laboratory, but the CEO of an ecological organization called Greene Planet, and his villainy, though still homicidal, is modest by Bond standards.

Bond’s pursuit takes us all across the world, of course — Austria, Russia, Haiti, Italy — and in the climactic sequence, to a sleek modernist hotel in the middle of the Bolivian desert. (In Los Angeles Plays Itself , the director Thom Andersen observes that in films set in Los Angeles, the bad guys are almost always associated with modernist architecture. James Bond films are no exception, and once a fireball starts raging through the hotel, there’s a gratuitous shot of Platner chairs engulfed in flames.)

The film is ostensibly about revenge, as it continues directly after the events in Casino Royale. (I’ll try not to spoil anything too much, but the act of vengeance concerns probably the most momentous death in the Bond series after the beautiful Diana Rigg’s in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, all the way back in 1969.) The title teases the viewer with the promise of some sort of psychological depth, but there’s little emotional complexity in this movie, something its predecessor, or especially Forster’s probably most critically lauded film, Monster’s Ball (2001), at least had. (If anything, the real love affair here is between Bond and Judi Dench’s M.)

Quantum of Solace — I do admire the producers’ bravery in trying to market such a clunky title — is also about velocity, and the film hurtles breathlessly from one action setpiece to another. But it’s difficult to admire the physics of a stunt when the camera is flying in every direction like this was a Michael Bay movie. And unfortunately, that’s all there is: the film occasionally stops long enough for the viewer to realize that there is hardly no connective tissue within the narrative. (What is he doing in Port-au-Prince again? And why did he have to go all the way to Italy to see Giancarlo Giannini?)

For someone ostensibly working in intelligence, there’s not much of it on display, and Bond doesn’t do much spying; even the new technology at hand is a mere retread of the iPod Touch Cover Flow from Minority Report. In the end, the disappointing Quantum of Solace is reducible to a set of action-movie signifiers: This could have been some old Jason Statham movie and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. It’s Bond as pure muscle, Bond as sheer brawn, Bond as — well, Robocop, except that Paul Verhoeven — or, hell, even Jason Statham — would have made Quantum of Solace a little less soulless.

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Possibly related posts:

1. Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker” (2008).
2. Paul W.S. Anderson, "Death Race" (2008).
3. Guillermo del Toro, “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army” (2008) / Christopher Nolan, “The Dark Knight” (2008).