Quantum or so Less...

In Casino Royale, filmmakers reinvented James Bond, casting Daniel Craig as the agent still on his way to earning his double-O status. Craig brought high-energy ruthlessness to the role and the franchise dropped the gadgetry and slickness that had eventually suffocated Pierce Brosnan's turn as the world's best-known double-nought secret agent.

Craig returns in Quantum of Solace, a film that has Bond pursuing leads to the murder of his girlfriend Vesper Lynd. On the way, he has another rooftop chase, deals with another pasty-faced lank-haired Eurotrash villain and kills some people. Imagine, if you like, that the interminable and pointless Texas Hold 'Em game of Casino Royale was made into an entire movie with chase scenes and varied locations, and you've got an inkling of what Quantum of Solace is like.

Craig himself squints, grimaces, kicks, punches, slices and shoots. He doesn't do a single thing in this movie that couldn't have been done by fellow Brit and action movie star Jason Statham. But that's OK, because in the hands of director Mark Forster and co-screenwriter Paul Haggis, James Bond doesn't do anything that couldn't have been done by Jason Bourne.

Forster apparently thinks Matt Damon is really cool, because he borrows not only the queasy unsteady-cam look and blip-quick scene cuts of the Bourne films, but also their balcony-jumping and explosive fight sequences. Haggis continues to write screenplays that are but lightly burdened with ideas. Lightly burdened with his own ideas, anyway -- Quantum features a straight-up theft from an earlier Bond pic that ought to earn a fine, if not community service (Suggestion: Haggis be ordered to spend one thousand hours not writing).

When Casino Royale came out, the general reaction seemed to be that Craig brought a style to Bond that the series had lacked since Sean Connery. That's an understandable view, coming as it did on the heels of Brosnan's awful Bond finale, Die Another Day. But Brosnan himself started out well, finally taking the role he'd had to turn down when someone finally realized Roger Moore looked more likely to throw out a hip than a judo chop. In between Moore and Brosnan, Timothy Dalton's two entries showed some intriguing promise, but Dalton's supposed distaste for the typecasting the role may have brought him led him to turn another direction. Playing Rhett Butler in the TV miniseries Scarlett, for one, which may prove there are worse things than typecasting.

But it'll take a third outing to see if Craig actually does something with the iconic superspy, and if the grim-and-gritty re-imagining of James Bond offered up in the more recent films can satisfy series fans who may not have liked the gadget overload of Die Another Day and its ilk, but who still like their world-saving done with some cool style...


P.S. The Jack White/Alicia Keys "Another Way to Die" opening credits theme is among the lamer and more unpleasant theme offerings of the series. As long as there's an Octopussy soundtrack with "All Time High" on it, though, "AWtD" doesn't have to worry about being the worst of the lot.