following the amazing critical and financial smash success of daniel craig's first james bond film
casino royale the producers of the franchise decided to strike while the iron was hot by
quickly green lighting a follow-up now in the days leading up to casino royale's release they were
actually teeing up the fact that the next daniel craig james bond movie which was to be called
quantum of solace from a short story in the freerides only collection was actually going to be
out 18 months later this would have been probably the shortest turnaround for a james bond movie
since the early days of sean connery but in the end cooler heads prevailed because i think it's
pretty hard to launch a 200 million dollar movie in 18 months and they ended up waiting a more
reasonable two years however the production of quantum of solace was plagued from start to finish
not the least bit by the writer's guild strike which derailed most tv shows in that era and
seriously hampered the film with apparently daniel craig and director marc forster having to come in
to rewrite some of the sections themselves during the screenwriters strike as neil purvis robert
wade and co-writer paul haggis couldn't write due to union rules now quantum of solace is a james
bond movie that's often heavily criticized most people consider it a vastly inferior sequel to
casino royale and i'm inclined to agree i remember going to see this movie at a critic screening
which in fact would have been the first critic screening i ever attended for a james bond film
and being let down i think my expectations were so high after casino rall i expected another all-out
masterpiece but what i got was not at all what i was expecting first of all it was a movie that was
only 105 minutes long which seemed really strange for a james bond movie when is the james bond
movie not at least over two hours watching the movie it felt really like a clone of the bourne
identity or rather one of the paul haggis sequels it was so evocative of the bourne franchise that
it felt like straight-up plagiarism and i felt like at times i wasn't watching a james bond
movie i was watching a bourne film it had non-stop action too much action there was no flavor to the
film which i think is where quantum of solace really goes wrong instead it's just a hectic
jumble of action scenes some of which i must admit are quite impressive and the movie holds up a
little bit better than i think people thought when it originally came out but probably is the second
worst of the daniel craig series now the premise of quantum of solace is kind of interesting this
was going to be the first time in the james bond franchise where we would get a direct sequel to
the predecessor and in fact quantum of solace picks up right where casino royale left off with
mr white in james bond's trunk of his aston martin db5 evading pursuers he's wearing the same suit
he was wearing at the end of casino royale it's picking up right where it left off and it starts
off in the middle of this insane car chase which i must admit is impressive but also impossible
to decipher i think part of the problem with this movie is that the second unit director dan bradley
who was renowned for doing the james bond films really seemed to almost be the director of the
film and his style of filming absolutely dominated the movie much more so than mark forster's in fact
it would take quite a while for the actual plot and james bondish elements of the film to actually
fall into place with it taking a long time for us to even be introduced to the villain and the
main james bond girl who in fact is not really a bomb girl at all in my opinion so in this movie
james bond is on the trail of quantum the shadowy group that betrayed vesper lind and set james bond
up he finds mr white who quickly escapes and leads him to dominic greene now dominic greene
is a leading member of quantum posing as a businessman working in reforestation a charity
funding for environmental science what he wants in this film is to create a coup d'etat by selling
water back to the bolivian government at rapidly inflating prices after creating an artificial
drought basically it's the premise of chinatown but in a james bond move along the way james bond
meets up with the kindest sort of bond girl in the film camila montes played by olga kurilenko
now this is a bit of a strange piece of casting because aura kurolenko is of course ukrainian
and she's playing bolivian in the film kind of in brownface which i think wouldn't go over too well
nowadays but people didn't really have a problem with i guess 12 years ago and hiroga kurlenko
i have to say is actually a really good actress and i think does a good job in the film like bond
she's damaged wounded by the fact that dominic greene her lover betrayed her and her family
and had most of them killed with her sporting a back scar that speaks to the tragedy in her
life and in fact there's a really really effective sequence at the end where heather with her family
having died in a fire she's kind of paralyzed in this inferno that she winds up in with james bond
and james bond in kind of a really gallant move really comforts her and saves her life
and i think is one of the most heroic moments for daniel craig in a james bond movie up to
this point now the movie does pick up on a lot of threads from casino royale renny mathis at the end
of casino royale is captured because everybody thinks that he's betrayed james bond and in fact
he turns out to be innocent and in this movie is pressed back into service opposite bond and
dies a pretty quick death which i think makes bond feel kind of sad and in fact james bond
inflicts a lot of collateral damage in this movie with the most notorious being gemma
arderton has mi6 agent strawberry fields who is quickly seduced by bond in a very stylish
scene but ends up being killed in a moment that i think is supposed to be a complete reference to
goldfinger with her dipped head to toe in oil it's not quite as visually striking as the golden girl
in goldfinger but it is kind of a nice moment and james blind indeed seems grieved by the fact that
she dies but also extremely cold-blooded as daniel craig is throughout most of these movies you see
in this james bond is on a path of vengeance with little time for any kind of emotion at all and
in fact the original screenplay of the film was supposed to be even darker with him discovering
a child left behind by best berlin that he was going to abandon in the end but of course
barbara broccoli and michael g wilson did force the writers to tone things down a little bit
because james bond ultimately is a heroic and just couldn't abandon the child at the end of the film
one of the most notorious creative decisions in this movie was to hire mark forster
a german director to direct who was the first bond director that was chosen from outside of
the british commonwealth forester was a very accomplished director at this time having directed
holly berry to an oscar win in monster's ball in addition to finding neverland stranger than
fiction and the kite runner and indeed would go on to direct a movie that became a huge huge kind
of what the [ __ ] episode for us the world war z but at the time you know he was an a-list director
and i think was considered a very classy choice for quantum of solace but it didn't quite work
out mark forster as solid a director as he is doesn't really seem like an action guy and in
fact he doesn't put much of a stamp on the action scenes which as i mentioned are really chaotic and
in fact kind of seem ripped off from the bourne franchise if ever a james bond movie was guilty of
copying other action films this was definitely the case with quantum of solace because if the bourne
movies didn't exist i feel like conor salas would have no style at all everybody involved clearly
watched those movies and wanted to do as much of a james braun approximation of them as they could
fair enough the bourne series itself is heavily inspired by the james bond series
but the way that he was fighting in those movies really does seem to get cloned here and it's a bit
of a disappointment because i think that casino royale struck a really nice balance between the
new style of action scenes and an older school james bond vibe my biggest problem with the movie
when i went to go see it is that it simply didn't feel like a james bond movie there was no glamour
there was no sex uh my family and i are looking for sex franklin there was a lot of action but
there was probably too much action i think james bond movies are at their best when they have a
couple of really big set pieces but then have kind of a compelling plot a larger than life villain
a bond girl and this movie doesn't really have any of them olga kurilenko is lovely but her
character is definitely not a bond girl the fact that there's no traditional bongo in the movie
does make sense of course because best berlin died in the previous installment and james bond
is still heartbroken and betrayed so it wouldn't really make sense for him to have another de facto
love interest although then again he does jump into bed pretty quickly with strawberry fields so
i don't know it seems like they kind of lost the plot here a little bit i remember seeing this
movie and being blown away by the action too blown away in fact by the time the fourth major action
scene in the movie began less than 30 minutes into the film i started to become numb to it
and the action scenes which are kind of cool are very very hard to follow in this movie
and totally lose their impact they're just the jumble of shots that don't really make any sense
if forrester does have strength i'd say that his visuals are pretty interesting the production
design of dominic green's quantum headquarters and the cinematography by roberto schaefer and
there's some really good style in the climax of the film but this is too little too late i think
there's some really dynamic shots but the movie itself is kind of boring plotline just isn't any
good and chief among the problems is the villain i think that matsi amarik is a great actor everybody
says he looks a lot like roman polanski and i'm inclined to agree although his eyes are crazier
but he's just not very memorable as the villain although he does get a blood-curdling death scene
where james bond leaves him alone in the desert without any water just some oil so that he could
die slowly it's pretty grim they found green dead in the middle of the bolivian desert of all places
they found motor oil in his stomach but there's never a second in the movie where i think he's
a credible threat to james bond and i remember his second in command elvis being terrible he
had a bowl cut which is revealed to be a wig so i don't get it he's supposed to be kind of comic
relief i mean you're supposed to be afraid of the henchmen you're not supposed to laugh at them
the bond villain in this movie is probably the worst we've ever gotten so i'd give him a five on
ten bond girl as i said she's not really a bond girl i love olga kurolenko i think she's beautiful
and i think the character is quite intriguing so i'd give her probably a seven on ten but it's just
the fact is there's no relationship i do wish that the movie had actually not been a straight sequel
to casino royale and then jumped ahead at least a couple of months you know in order to show bond a
little bit more back in his groove to make it more of a james bond movie or if they had decided to go
the really gritty route just don't bother having a bond girl at all in fact this kinda worked for the
next film in the series skyfall so it feels like they were going halfway between a bomb girl and
halfway between not having a bomb girl so she was a compromise and i don't think it really worked
out this is another one of the serious james bond movies that doesn't really have any gadgets
q only gets introduced in the next installment which of course we'll get to shortly although
there's some beautiful cars and my favorite thing about the movie is james bond's tailoring
in this film is absolutely on point with all of his clothes being done by tom ford i remember
when this movie came out i got myself a tom ford catalog and i wanted to buy this really cool
cardigan that he wears in the film of course i realized that the cardigan was something like two
thousand dollars i ended up not buying it but i got a bit of a knock off that it wore for a while
for about two minutes i think i looked a little bit like daniel craig but you know lost all my
hair so didn't get to look like him very long one of the things that's kind of interesting about
quantum of solace though is that the supporting cast is really good jeffrey wright is back as
felix slater who i didn't really mention that much in the casino royale episode but i always really
liked him in the part and i think he's very strong in this film with him having kind of a larger role
than usual although apparently his role which was actually even bigger originally was cut
down due to rewrites another guy that comes into the film is david harbour who before he became
famous doing stranger things shows up as greg beam a cia section chief for south america and one of
felix later's contacts he's kind of a cool actor to have in james bond movie and i found that he
really kind of grounded the movie in international intrigue but he's not in it quite enough
the movie has a kind of interesting musical score by david arnold and in fact it would turn out to
be his last james bond score ever although fingers crossed the hill eventually return one day what's
kind of interesting about the film is that the use of the james bond theme was kept to an absolute
minimum here just as it was in casino royale it pops up here and there but really not too much
it's a totally different approach to the score and kind of impressionistic actually it's too bad that
arnold wasn't allowed to continue because i always thought he was one of the greatest assets of the
series but they kind of seem to lose interest in his musical stylings after a while and i think
that's nowhere more evident than in the fact that the theme song would be done by jack white of the
white stripes and alicia keys another way to die which is the first james bond music duet but also
probably ranks as one of the least memorable james bond songs ever jack white is many things and i
think he's great but james bondish i don't think so and i think that their use of the song doesn't
really fit the movie too much although the opening credits are kind of cool and stylized although
not very james bond like i have to say now apparently this movie was one of the most
product placement enhanced films of all time with a reported 50 million pounds being earned
with ford heineken smirnoff omega virgin atlantic and sony ericsson all getting huge shout outs in
the movie why is this necessary because this also ended up being the most expensive james bond movie
to date costing a rumor 200 230 million dollars in 2008 dollars now no time to die is apparently
very expensive too but with inflation considered quantum of solace is indeed the most expensive
james bond film ever made and it's too bad because critical reaction to this film was not great it
earned an approval rating of about 65 on rotten tomatoes and in fact it was the first james bond
movie that i ever reviewed for joe blow and i gave it a 7 on 10. now i know that sounds pretty good
to you guys but to me as a james bond fan that had a really hard time being impartial about the
series it was devastating i remember going to see it and being sorely disappointed and it was the
first time that i realized you know what i was growing up as a critic because i could be fair
to the film and not just be blinded by my absolute love of james bond a lot of fans were critical of
the film none more so than roger moore of course the great great roger moore who played james
bond himself in seven movies who said that daniel craig was a damn good bond but the film as a whole
well there was just a bit too much flash cutting and it was this like a commercial of the action
there didn't seem to be any geography and you were wondering what the hell was going on and i have to
say that roger moore was dead on accurate in his rundown of the film that's the problem with the
movie you just really don't know what's going on at all and the film was actually a financial hit
probably as big of a hit in some ways as casino royale it broke box office records in the uk
and did really well in north america i think it was the biggest james bond opening of
all time with 67.5 million dollars it ended up grossing 589 million dollars worldwide which was
pretty good quality of solace had the biggest opening weekend of all time for a james bond movie
and actually outgrows casino royale by 1 million although internationally it was slightly less
successful and if you consider how much bigger the budget was i would say that the profit margins
for this film were minimal at best it was a very expensive movie to make and to promote and i think
that people were kind of disappointed with it overall including eon productions who would take
their time to craft a really solid third movie for daniel craig's james bond and of course with
skyfall they would get probably the biggest james bond movie of all time with box office records
broken that are still standing to this day it really would become a cultural phenomenon and this
movie was kind of seen by many as a misstep in the franchise watching quantum of solace again i don't
think it's quite as bad as some james bond fans seem to think it's definitely no casino royale
and it's not even nearly as good as skyfall which would be the next james bond movie but i do think
in some ways it's better than spectre which would become the fourth james bond film to star daniel
craig and i think that there's some really good things about it like i said the cinematography
is quite striking and there's some really dynamic sequences but the action is just a mess and it's
way too short there's not enough story here and i really wish they'd put off production of this
movie until the screenwriter's guild strike was solved it would have made for a much better james
bond movie and i think we'd all be much happier with the finished result but as it is juan masalas
is not a disastrous james bond movie it's just not a very good one and a disappointing second
installment for daniel craig and i give it a 6 on 10. but of course things would start to
look up on the next installment of james bond revisited bond i need you back i never left
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