James Bond: Shaken but Not Stirring

Let’s face it Quantum of Solace is no Casino Royale. While it still has the action, the car chases, the glorious Daniel Craig, and plenty of skin-baring moments it lacks a lot of the gritty emotion and, most of all humor, of Casino. Casino knew how to laugh at itself, with James refusing a shaken, not stirred martini, not knowing how to wear a suit, and practically giving away M’s real name. This time around, there were no jokes at the franchise, but perhaps that’s because this movie wasn’t about reimagining Bond, but about imagining a Bond in grief.

Quantum begins right where Casino left off, with the betrayal and death of Bond’s great love, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green). Bond deals with his obvious grief over her death by killing off every lead they have, as he and M (the fabulously fierce Judi Dench) try to pin down an evil organization. But finally, his car-chasing and scaffolding-fighting pays off when a briefcase leads him to a Brazilian would-be-assassin named Cami (Olga Kurlyenko) and a deviant corporate environmentalist turned world conqueror named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) who has plans to overthrow the Brazilian government in exchange for some desert land in the Middle East. It’s a convoluted plot to say the least, but all you really need to know is that this whole story is about revenge, and only sort of about stopping the bad guys from purposely creating a drought in Brazil.
As a villain, Mr. Greene is typically old school Bond. He’s smarmy and French, and somehow connected to Vesper’s death – and that’s really enough for us to hate him. Plus, he’s planning to put the Brazilian dictator, General Medrano, who killed Cami’s father and brutally assaulted her mother and sister before lighting their house on fire back in power. And that brings us to Cami, whose sole motivation is revenge for her family. She aims to kill General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio), and James bonds with her over their shared internal demons. (He’s still carrying a flame for Vesper and her Venetian love knot to prove it.) Olga Kurlyenko, however, is less enticing as a bond girl than Vesper. For starters, she’s about as Brazilian as her spray on tan (thank goodness they dropped in that line about her mother being a Russian ballet dancer). She’s also very one note. While Eva Green’s Vesper was the playful, smart, and feisty mouse to Bond’s cat, Kurlyenko’s Cami is just a scared little mouse. Granted, she never gets caught in Bond’s trap, unlike Bond’s other girl of the moment, the tragically named Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), who is bedded by Bond just a little too easily. And like all easy Bond girls, she gets a memorable death by oil drowning as her reward. Yikes.
As for the action not under the sheets, the violence was plentiful, quick, and, as Cami called Bond, “horribly efficient.” Director Marc Forester (Monster’s Ball, The Kite Runner) is not known for his action flicks, in fact this is his first, and it shows. The action shots were jarring and quick, making the punches hard to follow. Whose car was that that fell of the cliff?  He also has a tendency to intersperse his action scenes with other dramatic scenes happening outside the action. A fight under the city of Siena as Bond flees after a rogue agent that tried to shoot M is interspersed with scenes of a horse race going on above. Later a flight through the opera house after the agents of big evil organization “Quantum” is laced with images of the on-stage tragic opera, as characters in both scenes meet untimely ends to billowing music. For an action flick, it was all just a little too dramatic. Plus, those scenes of Bond racing across the tiled rooftops of Italian homes were like Jason Bourne déjà vu.

This is all not to say that Quantum is not a great action flick. It’s far superior to the majority of action nonsense hitting the theaters this year. And this one has Daniel Craig, whose dark, brooding, sarcastic performance continues to resonate and add a depth to Bond that even Connery failed to capture. He falls down hard and he throws himself against balconies. He gets bruised and cut and scraped and keeps jumping up for more. He’s one helluva a man – and a great action hero. Yet it’s Bond’s softer side that leaves this Bond feeling a little more deflated than Casino. He’s ruthless, but with a purpose, and his eyes (and drinking habit) reveal a pain that Bond never had before. But maybe that’s how it was supposed to be. If you go through the trouble of giving Bond feelings, you’re going to have to deal with them when the love of his life dies.

So this Bond was a little more old school with a lot less interesting Bond girls, but even in grief, he still managed to kick the butt of previous Bonds. The film’s bad guys may not have been that intriguing, but Bond’s inner villains sure were. And it was all necessary so he could get that quantum of solace he needed.