Project Bond: Quantum Of Solace

This isn’t a bad film, but it was a bit of a disappointment after the high of Casino Royale. Daniel Craig remains in good form, but that will only take you so far when the script is below par. Quantum of Solace is also noticeably shorter than most Bond films, and is in fact (according to a quick investigation) the shortest of all, at 1 hour 46 minutes, almost 40 minutes shorter than its immediate predecessor.

The franchise continues to break with tradition, with the gun barrel sequence moved all the way to the end for some reason. Unlike previous films, this one serves almost as a sequel, the start of Quantum of Solace following on directly from Casino Royale, with Bond having kidnapped Mr. White. Bond and M interrogate White, who, it turns out, is a member of a pure shady organisation called Quantum. By sheer coincidence, so is M’s bodyguard, Mitchell, who busts White’s way to freedom, and Bond is so mad that he kills Mitchell. Now M is mad because they can’t get any information out of him because he’s dead. Mitchell is probably also mad because he’s dead. White has had it away on his toes, so he’s probably not fussed.

A whole lot of silly events lead Bond to Haiti and another Quantum member, Dominic Greene, who is working for General Medrano, a baddie. Greene is trying to kill his girlfriend for some reason, Camille Montes, so naturally Bond teams up with her, so he is sure to be safe. He goes into the opera and hacks into Quantum’s earpiece chat, thus starting a big fight with guns and everything. A Special Branch guy gets killed, and M thinks it was Bond who done it, so she gets mad again and has all his credit cards stopped.

M sends another agent, named Strawberry Fields for some reason, to bring Bond home. He doesn’t like this idea, so he sleeps with her instead. Then Quantum comes after them and kills Fields in a very crude manner (drowning her in some crude oil), but Bond and Montes escape. Then M herself turns up and suspends Bond (again!), and sends a letter home to his parents. He runs away, then changes his mind and tells M that Fields was dead brave in the field, even though she was ironically not a field agent, which brings M back onto his side for some reason. The CIA is still mad at Bond, though, and only his old pal Felix believes his crazy story, so he helps him escape the CIA.

Meanwhile, Montes has gone after Medrano and killed him because she was so mad, while Bond tracks down Greene and abandons him in the desert with a refreshing can of engine oil. M tells Bond that Greene died, and he says it wasn’t him. M asks him to come back, because she’s not mad any more, and Bond says he never left. Top man.

This one was mostly fine, but a bit flat after Casino Royale. It felt a bit like a bridge film, something to connect the films either side of it, by establishing a criminal network. Quantum also feels like it’s just SPECTRE without the licence, and it’s surely no coincidence that this year’s Bond film will see them return, if the title is anything by which to go. Craig’s Bond is darker and more reckless, blowing cover for no reason but his own comfort, unhappy with the modest hotel Fields selects for them (“we’re teachers on sabbatical and we’ve just won the lottery”). In Casino Royale his room was booked under the name of Beech, but gave both names when checking in, alerting Le Chiffre to his identity. Craziness. Who knows what kind of mad stuff he’s going to get up to next?