DANIEL CRAIG IS BACK AS A YOUNGER 007, BUT THE MOVIE RELIES ON STORYLINES AND STUNTS THAT WE’VE SEEN BEFORE
'Quantum of Solace': The Bond Formula
A great Bond movie it’s not. In Bond movie hype season, it scarcely matters. You get Bond hype everywhere.
QUANTUM OF SOLACE
Three stars (Out of four)
Rated: PG-13
Daniel Craig, Dame Judi Dench, Mathieu Amalric, Olga Kurylenko
and Giancarlo Giannini star in Marc Forster’s newest contribution
to the most successful series in the history of movies.
Opening Friday in area theaters.
As part of it last week, we had star Daniel Craig saying to an interested bystander that maybe the world is now ready for a black James Bond. My advice is this: Do NOT perceive that to be part of the Western World’s wholesale racial reimagination of itself following the history-making election nine days ago. Most people seemed to, but I took it another way entirely.
If you translate it the way I do, it’s Craig, still physically wounded (arm in sling) from filming this latest Bond turn (and possibly in pain) saying “OK, I’d kind of like to get off the Bond-go-round now and back to real movie acting. After now doing two of them and being paid a quantum of wampum, I’m ready for someone else to model tuxedos and skivvies and hook up with exotic babes and beautiful cars.”
Don’t get me wrong: “Quantum of Solace” is worth seeing the way all Bond movies are.
But only barely. In fact, the first hour of it is like an abstract outline of a James Bond movie, with Bond being unusually mopey after the the betrayal of his true love in "Casino Royale," the vastly superior previous movie in the Daniel Craig Bond series.
It turns into a real movie eventually but it sure takes its sweet time about it. And even when it does, it is shameless about borrowing James Bond’s Greatest Hits from earlier movies (an almost contemptuous ecological variation on nude Shirley Eaton who was so stunningly gilded to death in “Goldfinger,” i.e., being so smothered that the nude beauty’s pores can’t breathe).
Because this Bond isn’t spraying every occasion with testosterone wisecracks and a randy, hairy pal of Austin Powers’ version of sophistication, you have to take his struggles at face value.
Not a great game plan, that.
Remember that the whole point of the Craig Bonds is that we’re seeing the earlier incarnation of James, before he was pitching fedoras onto Moneypenny’s hatrack from 15 feet away and ordering martinis shaken not stirred (which, as some experienced mixologists and barroom wags always pointed out, only means that he probably likes his martinis a little weaker than, say, the average Bond villain might).
Craig’s Bond, then, is the Proto-Bond. So why then is the movie full of already autumnal lines like M. telling Bond “when you can’t tell your friends from your enemies, it’s time to go?”
Sorry. This isn’t prime Bond here, or even close.
Note that one fellow’s name in passing is Guy Haines, the same fictional name as the tennis playing character that Farley Granger played in Hitchcock’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train.” The villain here — cleverly but also oddly — is a supposed kingpin of ecologically minded good works pointedly named Dominic Greene, who secretly wants nothing more than the rape and pillage of everything and is played by Mathieu Amalric, who was so spectacular in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
So, yeah, you’ve got lots of chases — car, foot, you name it — of a sort the “Bourne” movies now do better. And you also have an ambitious, if soggy, bad guy. How about a first-rate Bond babe then?
Well, the movie does a tiny bit better there. Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko looks like a svelte, younger version of Catherine Zeta Jones. Not all that much is required of her, not even a bad Jill St. John leer while James tells a telephone mouthpiece that “something just came up.” But she does what she needs to. It’s all by the numbers, if you must know. If I were Craig, I might now want to get off the Bond-go-round too.
There is, though, in truth one uncommonly interesting new wrinkle in “Quantum of Solace” (the very real title, by the way, of an entirely different Ian Fleming short story about the perils of misjudging one’s dinner companions. You can find it in a current collection of that title.)
The new wrinkle that first hit in the previous, much-superior “Casino Royale” was that Dame Judi Dench, one of the great living film actresses, was cast as James’ superior M.
That is actually thought out a bit in “Quantum of Solace,” where he saves her life and the two of them develop a strangely charismatic quasi-mother/son relationship. Her trust in him is total even while she tells him and everyone else that he’s just a probie who’d be cut off from all neatsy keen 007 privileges (that license to kill things) the minute he’s seen to personalize any vengeance.
We learn too that M. has a first name — Anne. (Anne? Yup.)
Fleshing out a quasi-maternal M/Bond relationship might have been hugely interesting — so much so that they might have finessed a chase or two to make room.
No such luck.
For the record, Jeffrey Wright is yet another high-octane actor in these new Bonds. He plays James’ faithful CIA buddy Felix. And he too doesn’t make too much of an account of himself.
It’s a Bond movie, then, the way a football game with a struggling team is still a football game.
Interesting, even cool, sometimes great things happen. A great game plan can even be spotted underneath the detours.
Any Bond movie — like any football game — is better than none.
Even when, like this one, it just doesn’t matter a whit.
