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QUANTUM OF SOLACE. Dir Marc Forster. 2008

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Casino Royale left Bond wanting revenge. QofS follows up with a frenzied opening car chase sequence, with Bond in the Aston screaming through tunnels, round bends, getting shot at and, eventually delivering his cargo. The unusual thing about this car chase is the camerawork. Rarely seeing whole vehicles, jigsaw close-ups of tiny bits of cars are slammed at the audience. This dizzying, anxiety inducing onslaught feels like being repeatedly hit in the face and deafened at the same time.

Several times the cinematography mixes two dramatic events together, ie a horserace above ground with an interrogation below. The result is confusion and disorientation and is reminiscent of the noise and colour of carnival intercuts from early Bond movies. QofS incorporates motifs from other Bond classics – a flight battle in mountainous terrain and a speedboat pursuit.

However, QofS omits the humour, the characterisation, the sexiness, the glamour, and a storyline. There is little sense of who these people are. Taking out the sex and graphic violence (as in Casino Royale) drops the rating down to a 12A which makes it clear that the audience for QofS are adolescent boys. Lots of explosions and noise, stunts and breakages, and no girly stuff like conversation. QofS lacks the humanity of Casino Royal, perhaps simply because no-one eats, sleeps or has sex. Bond does, apparently, have sex with an agent within an hour of meeting her but there is no sense of flirtation or mutual attraction, no seduction, and she supposedly succumbs to his line, ‘I can’t seem to find the stationery. Will you help me look?’ How could any girl resist?

In the few opportunities Daniel Craig is given to act, he is superb. The frenetic pace slows in a few places, enough for one scene following an air crash in which he and the Bolivian female agent show they both have scores to settle, another when he demonstrates enormous compassion when she is terrified, (lifted from the shower scene in Casino Royale), and the third when he is tender with Mathis. It’s a pity to waste a talented actor like this. Craig is more than just a fit, effective body and QofS portrays him as a machine who is immune to injury despite falling from heights many times, surviving car crashes, explosions and burning buildings. Judi Dench’s M has been rewritten as motherly, indulgent, and somewhat fragile rather than authoritative and waspish.

Hugely reliant on exciting stunt work, fight sequences are so close-shot and intercut it is impossible to see who is hitting who, who’s falling, who’s been shot, and why. There is some brief politico-economic discussion about land ownership which means that the bad guy gets to charge what he likes for water but these scenes lack tension. The script doesn’t provide verbal or psychological sparring, the threats are only physical. Oh, and the double agents are all British.
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