I love spies. No, let me rephrase that: I love James Bond. Sure, I was able to tolerate two of my least favorite actors, Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, when they starred in
Spy Game. Vin Diesel was decent in
xXx, but I didn't even bother seeing the sequel when he folded and they replaced him with Ice Cube. Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan? Please. None of them hold a candle to James Bond.
I'm more than just that guy who claims to be a Bond nut, then ignores the franchise for two or three years between movies. In college, I set a goal of watching every Bond flick, in order, in a year. During the course of that year, I would have "Spy Night" parties, where my friends and I would barbecue steaks, drink beer, and watch a comedy spy flick (like
Johnny English or
Spies Like Us), followed by whichever Bond movie I was on in the rotation. I'm one of only a handful of people in my generation who can identify George Lazenby by name, as opposed to just calling him "that one guy who only got in one Bond flick before they canned him" - and in fact,
On Her Majesty's Secret Service is my favorite James Bond adventure of all time.
Ian Fleming's literary adventures featuring the legendary spy mark specific milestones in my life. I read Live and Let Die in August of 2004, when I was living in England. Fleming's collection of short stories,
Octopussy and The Living Daylights, distracted me during several evenings at a local coffee house back home, while I was looking for my first post-college job. The second book I read after moving to California was
Moonraker, and when work took me to Georgia for a month, I read
Diamonds Are Forever. The first book I finished upon arriving in Virginia was
Doctor No. I remember those times vividly, thanks in part to their coincidence with the adventures of Commander Bond, the intrepid MI6 agent.
Because of my love for nearly all things Bond, I was aghast at Pierce Brosnan's final outing as the beloved spy (I refuse to even name the movie here, it was so terrible). It wasn't because of Brosnan himself - on the contrary, to borrow a phrase from the franchise, he performed the living daylights out of the role. I was aghast because everything else about the film was so completely ridiculous that it totally undermined the preceding decades of literary and cinematic excellence. Brosnan's last Bond film was so bad that, even though I'd loved Brosnan in the role, I understood the necessity of a "reboot" of the series with a new actor and a new direction in order to save James Bond from a premature death.
I was skeptical when Brosnan's replacement was announced for the role. I had hoped for either Jude Law or Ewan MacGregor, but because it was James Bond, and because I needed to get the bitter taste of the previous travesty out of my mouth, I decided that I'd reserve judgment. In November of 2006, I took a chance on a blond dark horse named Daniel Craig, and I was blown away.
Casino Royale was not only a faithfully updated adaptation of the
original Bond novel that introduced me to the series, it was excellent enough to rival the sole Lazenby film. This film became a hallmark of the only Winter I would spend in California, and I saw it three times - twice in one day, in fact. With a superb cliffhanger ending, I waited restlessly to watch Daniel Craig as he portrayed everyone's favorite espionage poster boy in his quest for revenge, while simultaneously demonstrating Bond's transition from brutal assassin to calculating professional spook. No herd of wild horses in the Union could have kept me away from the theater on the opening night of Quantum of Solace.
What a ripoff.
Now, I'll be gracious and objective and acknowledge that Quantum of Solace was not as bad as the Brosnan Film that Can't be Named, nor was it as bad as the worst Bond flick ever, View to a Kill (in which Roger Moore spends most of the movie wearing a "creepy old man" leather jacket, the Bond girl is a blithering idiot, and Christopher Walken as the villain is completely and totally wasted). Even so, Quantum of Solace was a severe disappointment.
Let's start with the most extraneous and trivial of the main talking points about every Bond film: the Bond girl. There are two in this film, and both are poorly employed. The primary Bond girl is played by Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko. Sadly, the most compelling elements of Kurylenko's foray into 007 history came during the media promotions for the film, when she was
derided by Soviet nationalists and said in an interview that she
doesn't care to do love scenes. Why a Ukrainian actress was retasked to play a Bolivian intelligence agent is beyond me, but a good love scene between Craig and Kurylenko - heck, between Bond and
anyone - would have improved this film. The closest we get is a brief encounter between Bond and Gemma Arterton, whose beauty and charm are insufficiently utilized during the course of her limited screen time. Her death, a tip of the hat to Goldfinger, is an undeserved move by director Marc Forster. Unfortunately, the lackluster Kurylenko (and her bizarre "burn scar", a shoddy attempt at foreshadowing) are unconvincing as a Bolivian spy motivated purely by revenge. As far as Bond girls go, Quantum of Solace might have done better to leave them out entirely.
Part of the beauty of 007 films is that they involve confrontations between someone who is good, even when conflicted and damaged, against individuals or organizations who are inherently bad, and ruthlessly potent. The primary villain in Quantum of Solace is a weakling named Dominic Greene (played by Frenchman Mathieu Amalric), whose accomplishments in the movie are using an environmentalist development facade to hide his real agenda, and cutting off the water supply for a bunch of poor Bolivian villagers. This somehow allows him to assist a rogue general in forcing a coup d'etat (as if the end of the Evo Morales regime would be bad for Bolivia), as well as allowing for a nebulous connection to bent CIA agents whose only motivation seems to be securing rights to untapped Bolivian oil. The CIA agents are an undeniable representation of the director's warped perception of America as corrupt, with a myopic fixation on petroleum - a popular sentiment with leftists, but unrealistic, and unworthy of a Bond film. Gone are the days when 007 teamed up with the ranks of CIA agents like Felix Leiter and Jack Wade as equal partners - Jeffrey Wright's portrayal of Felix Leiter as a rogue agent who turns on his corrupt comrades to do the right thing and help Bond is small consolation. Auric Goldfinger, Hugo Drax, Ernst Stavro Blofeld,
these were Bond villains. Even Gustav Graves, the over-the-top villain from the Brosnan Film that Can't be Named, is a better and more convincing nemesis than anyone we see in Quantum of Solace.
Perhaps the most ridiculous line in the entire film comes near the end, following the obligatory Hollywood criticism of American operations in the Middle East. As Greene and his cronies receive euros instead of dollars, one of the villains quips that "the dollar isn't what it used to be." Unfortunately for the producers, the movie premiered on a day in which the dollar was the strongest against the euro and the British pound that it's been since at least 2003. The joke's on them, not only for their timing of a line deriding the greenback, but also because betting on anti-American sentiment is a questionable tactic for securing repeat viewings of a movie from millions of American movie-goers, not to mention DVD sales.
I realize that his is a tough concept for Hollywood to swallow, but would it be so terribly difficult to see James Bond, beloved champion of all things Western, fighting a Middle Eastern terrorist in some exotic city like Algiers, Dubai, Tripoli, Damascus, or even Tehran? 007 has already been to Azerbaijan (
The World is Not Enough, 1999) and Egypt (
The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977), so we know that he knows that the region is there. In the past, he's even teamed up competing agents, such as KGB Major Anya "Triple X" Amasova (Barbara Bach, The Spy Who Loved Me) or Chinese spy Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh,
Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997), so it's not out of the realm of possibility that he could team up with some beautiful
mukhabarat agent from Amman, Beirut, or even Tripoli, in order to stop some al Qaeda affiliate from doing something nefarious that would impact both the UK and the Middle East. They could even work in some popular lines about the terrorists "undermining a peaceful religion". Maybe Eon Productions should have their people call my people?
Daniel Craig is an excellent James Bond. His performance in Casino Royale was top notch, and he is rightfully described as a competitor for the top Bond actor ever - face it, Connery fans, it's the truth, and if most of you had read any of the novels, you'd know that. Only after he has completed his run will we know for sure, but he certainly won't take his place at the top if he keeps getting lousy scripts like these. Craig's performance elevates Quantum of Solace from wretched to tolerable. Indeed, the only truly compelling element of the entire plot is Bond's quest to find his own solace by seeking justice against those who engineered the events that led to Vesper Lynd's death in the previous film. If this film is worth seeing in theaters, even once, it's for the character development of Craig's particular flavor of Bond, and nothing else. Even this has its weak points, such as the subplot of whether or not M (played once again in spectacular fashion by the brilliant Dame Judi Dench) should trust Bond - a sequence that wastes the acting prowess of both Craig and Dench by retreading both lines and themes that worked well for Casino Royale, to little tangible effect for the flow of this film.
This brings up yet another criticism of the film: its reliance on the events of the previous episode. One of the hallmarks of the Bond franchise is that, almost without exception, an uninitiated viewer can watch and enjoy any given Bond film with little or no knowledge of 007's previous adventures. Quantum of Solace not only violates this rule by relying heavily on the events of Casino Royale for any semblance of comprehensibility, but the eventual fate of sometimes-ally René Mathis confuses the events of the prior film. Quantum of Solace concludes with yet another cliffhanger, poorly crafted by comparison to its predecessor, suggesting that it's meant to be the second of three installments. Cinema fans and 007 junkies alike will wonder if the next film will further tarnish Daniel Craig's tenure as James Bond in the same way that great and recent films like
The Matrix and
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl were tarnished: by coupling a truly excellent standalone film with a pair of half-cocked sequels to make a disappointing trilogy. For the sake of Daniel Craig's career, and his legacy as James Bond, I hope this isn't allowed to happen.
Since 007 first came alive on the pages of a 1953 novel by Ian Fleming, through the Connery, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan years, both during and following the Cold War, James Bond has been a hero to all who count themselves as beneficiaries of Western Civilization. No matter what the exotic backdrop, who the beautiful woman, or what the dangerous mission was, on paper or on screen, James Bond has always had a clear view of who his allies were, and who his enemy was. These qualities made Bond a hero to the members of every generation that knew him, because they could see themselves in his shoes, fighting the world's real evils alongside virtuous allies. It is for these reasons that Bond is described as "what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like to have between her sheets." Quantum of Solace, in addition to its other sins, undermines this consistency and clarity; in doing so, it undermines the very things that make 007 so heroic to so many fans. One can only hope that those responsible for bringing him to life will learn their lesson, and avoid making the same mistake twice.
