LionhearTV

Back before digital downloads became all the rage, music lovers had to go to record stores to buy CDs of their favourite artists and bands. Before the CD, there were audio tapes, eight-track tapes and older still, vinyl records.

In every record, there are usually two or three really good tracks that get repeated listens, another two or three that are halfway decent and the rest are what is known as filler. The numbers could vary for some albums depending on the listener, but in the end, there’s always that one song in the album that makes you scratch your head and skip to the next song.

Which brings me to the latest James Bond movie "Quantum of Solace" starring craggy Daniel Craig. My expectations for this movie were high especially after the masterful "Casino Royale" in Craig’s first outing as Bond showed us a superspy who was equal parts finesse and ferocity. One thing going for this movie is that it directly references the events of Casino Royale, making it the first true Bond sequel in the franchise’s history.

Quantum of Solace is a mixed bag, equal parts thriller and filler that pops and crackles but never quite engages in the same way that Casino did. It plants seeds for the next great Bond film without actually being that film because of hackneyed plotting, boring characters and lack of a decent threat for the world’s foremost spy.

The film starts promisingly enough, though. Bond (Craig) beats some bad guys in a car chase to bring the enigmatic Mr. White (whom we last saw at the end of Casino) to Italy for a protracted interrogation scene. "The first thing you should know is that we have people everywhere," smirks Mr. White before M’s (Judi Dench) bodyguard shoots at the other agents, including M.

Bond pursues M’s bodyguard in a rooftop parkour sequence that’s ripped straight from the Bourne Ultimatum but is much better than the overtly long chase at the beginning of "Casino Royale." To its credit, the betrayal does show how high the stakes are and builds on the relationship between Bond and M.

"Impress me," intones M and the movie does, at least in the first few reels. Using information gathered by MI6, Bond zips to Port Au Prince, Haiti to follow a lead on the White case and ends up literally killing that lead in brutal hand-to-hand combat. Thirty minutes in, we’re already getting quite a body count. "Slate was a dead end," Bond deadpans and for once, we forget to smirk because this Bond seems to enjoy his license to kill a bit too much.

We are then introduced to Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko), the obligatory Bond girl who is seducing the movie’s main bad guy Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) in order to kill would-be dictator General Medrano. It seems that White’s and Greene’s supersecret organization appropriately called Quantum is in bed with the Bolivian general to topple his government in exchange for a piece of desert property.

Camille’s plan to kill Medrano is foiled by Bond, which leads to a brutal speedboat chase that’s as bone-crunching as the car chase at the start of the film. One thing to say about this Bond – he sure treats his vehicles like blunt instruments. He also doesn’t care about doing a little B&E and even once steals an idle vehicle.

The scene then moves to Austria where the stakes go even higher as the CIA joins forces with Greene and places a hit on Bond. At this point, we are reminded again why we love Bond movies so much because of what it offers -- exotic locales, amorphous world threats and adrenaline-pumping action. When Bond kills a henchman of one of the Quantum members, he earns the ire of MI6 and has to go solo as he tries to stop Greene’s plan to corner the water services market in Bolivia. Yup, this Bond baddie is less a megalomaniac and more a ruthless businessman who likes to play Monopoly for real.

It is here though that the movie starts losing steam. Part of the problem is that the action scenes in the latter half of the movie feel rushed and fail to excite as much as the first three sequences in the movie. We get short bursts of action such as Bond jumping off a plane without a parachute and his stealthy escape sequence from military commandos but not much payoff.

Even a daring elevator escape a la Die Hard 3 is done too quickly, as if the director forgot that the best action sequences are when the camera lingers long enough for the aftermath before moving on to the next locale.

The bad guy’s motivations also leave something to be desired. Greene wants to get the whole MWSS franchise in Bolivia? Not very thrilling, sorry. For some reason, Casino’s poker games seem more menacing than Quantum’s plan of eco-terrorism simply because we can imagine all sorts of terrible things a bad guy could do with $120 million.

Finally, the Bond girl’s subplot to kill the Bolivian general felt unnecessary to the story. True, Camille’s motivation for revenge echoes Bond’s inconsolable rage over Vesper’s betrayal in "Casino." We also know that the evil general will get his comeuppance at the end of the film but must it be done in such an unimaginative manner? When Bond does put a coda to his own revenge plot, we are past the point of caring because we already forgot that he was pursuing that lead in the first place.

So what we have here is a Bond movie that's only half decent but not very memorable, like those odd numbered Star Trek films. Let’s hope that the next movie will fare better. Source