Quantum of Solace opens on a car chase and never really stops moving. That is the problem. The twenty-second James Bond film, directed by Marc Forster and written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis, runs 106 minutes and treats almost every one of them as a sprint. Daniel Craig returns as James Bond for the second time, following Casino Royale in 2006. The tagline promises “Have Regrets. Get Revenge.” The film delivers the revenge. In this paper’s view, it forgets to deliver much else.
Trailer, via QuantumOfSolace.
Craig Comes Back Fitter and Angrier
Craig is the best thing here, and he knows it. His training for the reprise put extra effort into running and boxing, meant to spare him the injuries he took on stunts in the first film. He came in fitter and less bulky than he had been for Casino Royale. He practised speedboating and stunt driving. He called Casino Royale physically “a walk in the park” compared to this one, and said Quantum of Solace required a different performance because it is a revenge film, not a love story.
That distinction is the whole movie in one sentence, and it is also the movie’s trap. Revenge gives Craig a narrow register to play, and he plays it hard. The face is set. The jaw is tight. There is not much room left for the charm that made Casino Royale work as more than a bruise.
The production left marks on him. While filming at Pinewood, he took a gash to the face when he was kicked, which needed eight stitches, and a fingertip was sliced off. He laughed both off and noted they did not delay filming. He joked his finger would let him have a criminal career, though it had grown back by the time he said so. He also had minor plastic surgery on his face.
Olga Kurylenko Plays Camille Montes
Olga Kurylenko plays Camille Montes, a Bolivian agent with her own vendetta against Dominic Greene and General Medrano. Forster cast her from a field of 400 women who auditioned, including Lisa Ray, because she seemed the least nervous. A then-unknown Gal Gadot was asked to audition for the role, which started her acting career.
Kurylenko read the script and was glad it had no sex scene with Craig. She felt it would have pulled attention away from her performance. She spent three weeks training to fight with weapons and learned body flying, a form of indoor skydiving. She described the work as “training non-stop from the morning to the evening,” and said she overcame her fears with help from Craig and the stunt team. She was given a DVD box set of Bond films to study.
She is good, and in this paper’s view she is underused. Camille has a real grievance — Greene is helping the exiled Bolivian General Medrano, who murdered her family, to overthrow the government and take the presidency in exchange for a piece of desert that looks barren. That is a clean, ugly motive. To this paper’s eye, the film keeps cutting away from it to chase other things.
Mathieu Amalric’s Dominic Greene Has No Weight
Mathieu Amalric plays Greene, an environmentalist entrepreneur who is really a monopolist. His plan is to corner Bolivia’s freshwater supply. That is the actual scheme, and it is a decent one for a Bond villain: not a laser, not a bomb, just water.
Amalric plays him small and twitchy, which is a choice. It does not land. Greene never feels like a man who could run Quantum, the organization that blackmailed Vesper and turns out to be far more complex and dangerous than anyone imagined. He feels like a man who would lose an argument at a dinner party.
The supporting cast is deep, and this paper would call it mostly wasted. Judi Dench returns as M. Giancarlo Giannini returns as Mathis. Jeffrey Wright returns as Felix Leiter. Gemma Arterton plays Strawberry Fields. David Harbour plays Gregg Beam, the head of the CIA’s South American section. Jesper Christensen returns as Mr. White. Rory Kinnear is Tanner. Tim Pigott-Smith is the Foreign Secretary. Anatole Taubman is Elvis.
Too Much Story for 106 Minutes
Here is the shape of it. Bond drives Mr. White from Lake Garda to Siena, evades pursuers, and hands him to M. M interrogates White about Quantum. White says their operatives are everywhere. Then M’s bodyguard, Craig Mitchell, shoots a guard and goes for M. Bond chases Mitchell and kills him. White escapes in the confusion.
Bond and M search Mitchell’s flat in London and find he had a contact named Edmund Slate in Haiti. Slate is a hitman sent to kill Camille at the order of Greene, her lover. Bond follows Greene to a performance of Tosca in Bregenz, Austria. The CIA’s Beam and Leiter cut a noninterference deal with Greene for access to supposed Bolivian oil, which the CIA thinks is why Greene wants the land. Bond infiltrates Quantum’s meeting at the opera and a gunfight breaks out.
A Special Branch bodyguard working for Quantum member Guy Haines, an advisor to the British PM, refuses to answer Bond’s questions, so Bond throws him off a roof. He lands on Greene’s car and one of Greene’s men shoots him dead. M assumes Bond killed him and orders him home. He disobeys. She revokes his passports and cancels his payment cards. Bond goes to Talamone and talks Mathis into coming with him.
That is a lot of story for 106 minutes, and the film pays for it. Scenes start and stop before they breathe. A gunfight at the opera should be a set piece. Here it is a montage.
The Ken Adam Influence and a Fleming Title
The film’s title comes from a 1959 short story by Ian Fleming. That is a strange, quiet source for a movie this loud, and in this paper’s reading the mismatch shows. Quantum of Solace wants the melancholy of Fleming’s title and the momentum of a modern action film, and it gets neither cleanly.
Where it does show care is in the look. In contrast to Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace cites inspiration from early Bond film sets designed by Ken Adam. That is a real thread back to the series’ past, and the film is better for it. It also departs from tropes usually tied to the franchise.
Production was long and scattered. A second Craig Bond film was planned before production began on Casino Royale in October 2005. In July 2006, Roger Michell was announced to direct with a planned release for May 2008. He left that October after delays with the screenplay. Purvis, Wade and Haggis finished the screenplay by June 2007, and Forster was named as Michell’s replacement. Craig and Forster also did uncredited rewrites.
Principal photography ran from August 2007 to May 2008. Locations included Mexico, Panama, Chile, Italy, Austria and Wales, with interior sets built and shot at Pinewood Studios. Craig advised Haggis on the script and helped choose Forster as director. That is a lot of hands on one screenplay, and in this paper’s view the seams are visible.
Ranking What Actually Works
A short accounting, in order of what matters most:
- Daniel Craig’s physical commitment. He is the reason to watch, even when the script gives him nothing to play but anger.
- Olga Kurylenko’s Camille. A real motive, a real performance, not enough screen time.
- The Ken Adam-inspired design. The film looks like it remembers where it came from.
- The title’s debt to Fleming. A good title wasted on a film that never sits still long enough to earn it.
- Mathieu Amalric’s Greene. A villain with a small voice and no weight.
- The plot. Too many countries, too many double-crosses, too little consequence.
The order matters because this paper reads the film’s complexity as a cost, not a feature. Quantum is not a more interesting enemy than a lone madman here. Complexity without clarity is just noise, and Quantum of Solace is noisy.
A Sequel That Mistakes Speed for Stakes
Quantum of Solace is a sequel that mistakes speed for stakes. Casino Royale ended with Bond betrayed by Vesper, the woman he loved, and this film picks up that wound and then sprints away from it. Bond fights the urge to make his latest mission personal, and in this paper’s view the film never decides whether that fight is the story or just the setup.
It is not a bad film. It is a thin one. Craig is game. Kurylenko is game. The design team is game. Nobody involved is lazy. But the screenplay came out of too many writers, too many delays and one director change, and in this paper’s judgment the result plays like a film assembled rather than made.
The revenge tagline is honest, at least. This is a revenge film, as Craig said. The trouble is that revenge is a small engine, and in this paper’s view Quantum of Solace asks it to pull a globe-trotting thriller, a franchise reset and a love story’s aftermath all at once. It cannot.
Metacritic scored the film 58/100.
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