Movie Log: Quantum of Solace

If I were really, really anal-retentive, I'd have saved this movie up to be "Saturday Is James Bond Day #22," but I'm not -- and, besides, I think my kids are only going to see the movies up to the end of Roger Moore this time around.

So The Wife and I saw Quantum of Solace by ourselves -- though I have to say that both boys noticed we had the movie and showed interest in seeing it. (If they had seen it, though, I doubt they'd have wanted to see a Bond movie ever again -- this one is adult in the least interesting ways and manages to make Bond dull.)

I chose this particular product shot for two reasons: one, because Daniel Craig's head is so poorly composited onto that generic body, and, two, because The Wife noted specifically during the movie that Bond never uses automatic weapons. (And she surely wasn't the only one to notice that.) Photoshop can be so dangerous in the wrong hands, can't it?

Quantum of Solace looks like a giant pile of wasted opportunities to me, from beginning to end. After rebooting the series with Casino Royale -- which was a little self-indulgent with the parkour, and made other changes to the novel for silly reasons, but was a solid thriller movie and basically accurate to Fleming -- Broccoli & Co. could easily have slid right into Live and Let Die and continued their string. Instead, they picked one of the last few remaining unused Fleming titles (left unused for a reason, along with unsuitable titles like "Property of a Lady" and "Risico"), grabbed an off-the-shelf supervillain plot on special at Kmart, threw in an uninspiring villain, and let it all sit until tepid.

Bond spends the entire movie sulking over the girl who died at the end of the last movie, retroactively sullying Casino Royale by reminding us that it ended the wrong way but still making us wish we were still watching that movie instead of this one. There's also an equally sullen Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko), whom he doesn't even bother to try to sleep with. I'm pretty sure that Craig can act if allowed to, but the entirety of his direction in Quantum seems to have been "Scowl. OK, scowl harder. Furrow your brow....now, scowl again."

The effects sequences are well-staged, and things blow up nicely; it's not a boring movie. But it is an intensely dull one, which rises to self-parody once the audience realizes that the evil scheme of the fiendish Quantum organization is to corner the water market in Bolivia...by building secret dams half a mile from town and hoping no one notices. (The undertones are particularly unsubtle as well -- every time the pseudo-eco-friendly villains come back on, it's like having a repeated Rush Limbaugh elbow in the side -- yes, I get it, Cubby or whoever, you think global warming is bunk. Now go back to your villa to count some more money.)

There have been worse Bond movies than this -- there may even have been duller and more tedious ones, since I haven't seen any of the Dalton or Brosnan films -- but I'd hold Quantum of Solace up against anyone's turgid, pointless thriller.