Bond, Marc Forster's Bond
Even in art house director’s hands, Quantum Of Solace screams “Action!”
By: Amy Nicholson
Daniel Craig is rarely so loquacious. He’s spent most of his career mute. Inert even, from the neck up. Lesser actors—say, Matt Damon—have given the technique a go and made a botch of it. (Damon’s Jason Bourne—oh those honorific initials!—is a lump of putty gone globe-trotting.) But Craig’s face has so many unusual folds and creases that the shadows splaying across it are expressive and alive. Like Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, he has A Face. And here it’s pummeled, bloodied, and presumably charred, though in a climactic fire sequence, there’s the clear sense that his Bond, and his Bond’s Tom Ford suits, are impervious to flames. Earlier, he demonstrates that six martinis don’t even make him wobble. Yet despite these superpowers, Craig never feels as slick and false as, say Roger Moore on skis.
As if making amends to the fanboy crowd for his art house pedigree, Forster packs his installment with jangling chases. In ascending order of greatness, we see a smash-up brawl between fast boats, fast planes, fast cars, and best of all, fast humans, with helicopters and scooters tossed in like sprinkles. The mano-y-mano parkour sprint is a blast—two men, equally matched, racing across the rooftops of Italy like wholly instinctual animals, tumbling off platforms and clutching at ropes. It’s designed for applause. During it, Forster inexplicably cuts between the men and a nearby horse race; later, he splices in footage of a tragic opera while Craig tries to hold our attention to the plot. It’s as if Forster is elbowing us to agree that the franchise in his reins is just another spectacle. Which is true, but I’ve rarely seen a director edit himself out of business. As spectacles go, he continues on to give us a fine one. Quantum of Solace is all action—words, even the ones in the title, mean little. (I’ve still got no idea what the title even means, though screenwriters Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade have amended Ian Fleming’s intent by making Quantum the name of Bond’s baddies.)
Quantum is out to control the world. Not with anything so outlandish as a death ray, but a scheme that’s credible and quite possibly already in action, depending on who you ask. Composed of powerful men from around the globe, it’s a rich conglomerate that installs puppet dictators and drains their nation’s resources—just the sort of trendy conspiracy that adds political heft to fisticuffs. Here, main enemy Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) postures as an environmental activist; he’s really out to pillage Bolivia by shoving the deposed General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio) back in office. The General, in turn, is hunted by a woman named Camille (Olga Kurylenko, a gorgeous Ukrainian model affecting a Spanish accent) who seeks revenge for that time he shot her father, raped and killed her mother and sister, and burned down her house. Only two other women decorate the cast, Gemma Arterton as a plucky M16 agent and the ever-stalwart Judy Dench as the voice of reason caught between a rogue agent akin to a clumsy bear that can’t stop killing their leads, and a prickly, but passive government scolding her that if the British “refuse to do business with villains, we’d have no one to do business with.”
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
