Director Marc Forster said of his film that he wanted it to be “fast, like a bullet”. So fast that it is the shortest of Daniel Craig’s Bond movies, so brief that it rushes through exposition at a rate of knots and ponderous silences are mercifully cut short. The plot is rushed, erratic and confusing.
Quantum of Solace was a short story by Ian Fleming that was tenuously linked to his literary protagonist for, in essence, it had no mission for Bond and very little involvement for him. It was a peculiar decision to use the title for the second Craig film, naming the mysterious organization Quantum and deploying themes like reflection, grief and solace.
Nonetheless, this wasn’t the first time the makers have used the tiniest Fleming-ism for a film title or inspiration (GoldenEye, The World Is Not Enough) and it is unlikely to be the last.
Back to the short timing and fast pace of Quantum of Solace, this might be the result of the director’s artistic vision but it might also be a flawed script and plot that meant anything longer would have been superfluous. Quite famously, during the making of the movie, there was a writer’s strike which meant wordsmiths Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade were not readily available throughout so that the burden fell on star Daniel Craig and Forster to polish the dialogue.
That this is a direct sequel to Casino Royale combined with the aforementioned factors makes Quantum of Solace feel like the sixth act of the previous film. Indeed, it picks up immediately after the events of the first film with Bond having kidnapped Mr White and involved in a car chase with supposedly Quantum henchmen. That they want to drive Bond off the road thus killing their leader when they have their Plan B MI6 mole Mitchell waiting at the other end is incredibly dumb even by the standards of this franchise.
Bond spends much of the film reconciling himself to Vesper’s death while trying to understand who were responsible. The former leads to a lot of scenes involving a blank faced 007 while the latter means a lot of exposition during action sequences, obfuscating how illogical the plot and Bond’s direction of travel is.
A good or reliable film delivers across the piece. A mediocre one contains a few good scenes or moments. Quantum of Solace is in the latter category mainly because it cannot gel those sequences into a coherent narrative. It is constantly plagued by muddled thinking.
The Daniel Craig era films have been connected in a way, for example, the Pierce Brosnan ones were not. There is more than just the cast maintaining the continuity. Therefore the tone of all five films has been similar. Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale had a classic look and feel so that it hasn’t dated while the movies directed by Sam Mendes possessed a rich cinematic appearance using a range of filters and interesting shots. Take the fight Bond has with Patrice in Shanghai or the tracking shot through the Day of the Dead festival in Spectre. Both are arresting and visually striking sequences. No Time To Die is similarly interesting to look at with luscious palettes used in the cinematography. All four are well edited.
Quantum of Solace is the one that sticks out like a sore thumb among the five. The erratic editing and jump cuts make it a dizzying ride for the audience from the opening car chase to the free running fight over the roof tops to the helicopter sequence in the desert. It’s death by a thousand cuts!
There’s the choice to merge in graphics with the action to denote phone calls connecting or internet searches. It looks very 2008 in an attempt to mimic the Jason Bourne movies or Minority Report. This doesn’t really do much other than look like a stylistic gimmick but it’s one they didn’t use in any of the other movies. Of the reboot movies, it is the least Bond in appearance and style. The death of Fields covered in oil is all the more mystifying as a questionable callback to Goldfinger.
Forster makes the mistake that one of his predecessors did and would have been wise to take note. In 2002’s Die Another Day, director Lee Tamahori dragged the series into the 21st century with his own artistic vision of what it should look like. Cue lots of swirling surround shots, jump cuts, fast focusing and blue screen CGI. It often seems like Bond has driven his latest Aston Martin model into a MTV featurette. Indeed, one half expects actor and title track singer Madonna to be joined by Eminem, Coldplay and Atomic Kitten. It is very much of the time, as is Quantum of Solace.
Martin Campbell and Forster both used free running in their films. Campbell made one directorial decision in shooting them from distance to reflect the scale of the stunts a la all the best Bond parachute drops like with The Spy Who Loved Me and The Living Daylights. Let the stunt breathe. Forster gets in close and personal. The rooftop fight and Bond’s flight from the CIA are jerky and hyperactive. Because of the close ups, for the viewer to make sense of the action progressing, there is a need to constantly cut away to another aspect of the scenario when one senses panning, a wide shot or tracking shot might have been smoother.
It is fast – “like a bullet” – but it doesn’t resonate. While one felt the impact of Bond’s fight in the toilets or down the staircase in Casino Royale, this is found wanting for most scenes of this ilk in the second movie. Admittedly the killing of Slate in the hotel is fast (this time because of the choreography) and well executed, most of the action sequences remind one of Warner Bros Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons to the extent one half expects an anvil to follow the helicopter when it drops from the air in the desert scene.
Similarly once again to the work of Tamahori, Forster employs a dual action sequence during the climax in the compound in the desert. In Die Another Day Brosnan’s Bond slugged it out with villain Gustav Graves, interspersed with a parallel duel between Halle Berry’s Jinx and Miranda Frost. This is a tiresome trope in cinema and one which Forster repeats as Craig’s Bond combats Mr Green while Camille does likewise with Medrano.
While everything is so rushed and “fast, like a bullet”, once one scrutinizes the plot, you realize just how pathetic it is. Bond starts the film off seemingly wanting to bring in Mr White – presumably Quantum’s main man in Europe – before being weirdly distracted to go off after Mr Green who is their South American operative. Once you remember that White was guilty of the death of Vesper and was hauled in front of M before her own security guard tried killing her…why the feck is Bond not on White’s trail?
One can only surmise that the writers (if they got this far) envisaged a third film to feature Mr White as the main antagonist and that this was merely Bond leaping down a rabbit hole after another Quantum operative to give them some form of gravitas. That, of course, did not happen which is why Spectre seemed rather weird in embracing the characters we’d not heard about for seven years.
That’s the problem with Quantum of Solace. As a continuity movie, it gives the following films a burden every time it missteps. The very existence of it surely compelled the producers to resolve the loose ends in the tiresome way they did in Spectre.
It also suffers a lot because of what went before and followed. It was book ended by two of the most lauded Bond movies. Casino Royale and Skyfall now rub shoulders with From Russia With Love in the fan rankings. After the former, Quantum of Solace seemed flat and once you’d seen Skyfall you might have forgotten about it like a middle sibling lacking charisma.
History won’t be kind to Quantum of Solace. It is difficult to think of a film in the franchise that was so great as Casino Royale being followed by such a failure on so many levels. Maybe On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to Diamonds Are Forever?
The brooding silences in this film, mainly from the main protagonist, betray a lack of guile from the producers, the director and the absence of screen writers. Not for the first time did the franchise makers think any old thing would do yet nearly kill off another promising era in its infancy.
Athon 