Flying high off the back of Casino Royale, Daniel Craig and co. return with this poorly-titled, somewhat short entry into the annals of Bond history.

The most glaring sore point is the weak, badly executed plot. We follow a businessman backing a Bolivian coup in return for the nation’s water supply. It seems like something for a larger authority to get involved with rather than a semi-rogue super spy. This feels like a real MI6 operation, and a dull one at that.

Quantum of Solace was made during the writer’s strike and Craig himself has admitted that he had to co-write much of it with the director, the two making it up as they went along. This is a reasonable excuse but obviously it doesn’t make it a better story.

There’s a lot of action packed into the film. None of it really serves any real purpose other than to distract from the fact nothing is happening; but some of the sequences are really quite entertaining so in a way this tactic pays off! The opening car chase is a like-it-or-loathe it pastiche of a Bourne film; it’s a brash start and at least it tries to make some sort of statement. There’s just something missing there though and things quickly become confusing instead of enthralling.

The opera scene is also noteworthy, it’s a cool idea and Craig’s smug superiority fits the moment. As he uncovers the members of an illegal organisation one by one, it’s satisfying to see they have been rumbled. Unfortunately like the rest of the film it starts with a bang and ends with a whimper, the scene not really going anywhere.

There are some good central performances as usual. Daniel Craig has successfully put his own spin on Bond now and makes you want to see anything he does. Judi Dench gets a little more to do than last time. Olga Kurylenko is exotic enough to fit the bill but doesn’t actually get anything to do. It’s a shame that the only Bond girl who doesn’t sleep with Bond should be so wishy-washy. Gemma Arterton suffers a similar fate although she does manage to give some extra depth to her limited role.

The same can be said for the villain, who is so unremarkable it’s hard to remember what role he actually plays. The idea is supposed to be that Bond is up against a ‘normal’ bad guy, which is ‘real’ and therefore scary but it doesn’t actually make it any more menacing, just boring.

Quantum of Solace isn’t a particularly bad Bond film compared to some of the dreck we’ve seen so far, but just when Casino Royale showed us that the franchise was beginning to take a fresh start; this is a step in the wrong direction. It’s a film like no other in the series, and Craig is always a joy to watch, but otherwise this is a forgettable moment in Bond’s history.

http://benoliver999.com/film/2015/09/26/quantumofsolace/

James Bond versus Nestlé, featuring: greenwashing, offhand showing the CIA being terrorists, and only a little unintelligible British mumble acting. Possibly the only Bond film made, even to date, that has what counts as meaningful commentary on the geopolitical and economic events it sensationalizes. I have to admit, I came away unimpressed upon my initial viewing in theatres, and I can chock that up to my own ignorance of the world. I just re-watched it, and I have to say it may be the best executed Bond film of the ~15 I've seen. I'll have to re-watch _Skyfall_, but this may actually be the best all-around Bond film.

The reality of the plot seems to have mirrored the backdrop of real world power structures too much for audiences to have appreciated it, ironically enough, given how high stakes the reality is, but I can't point to any particular flaw in the plot or script, which is nearly unheard of (perhaps the mention about running out of oil, but that will still happen eventually, and people thought it was more imminent around 2008.) It's very tight, and that's something that the extremely bloated Bond films have needed since the sixties. People may have complaints about the action, though I'm not sure why. Action scenes have always been the downfall of the pacing for most Bond films in my experience, but this film neatly opens and intersperses the plot with them instead of having the entire film overtaken by laboriously long and tedious action scenes and, followed by the perennial favorite of "Bond gets captures, but the villain doesn't kill him for ~reasons~", which was thankfully absent here.

I can't help but think this would have fared better and been memed instead of forgotten, had it been released ten years later.

There are some individual moments that work, but this is overall a mess.
The story is hard to follow, the new characters aren’t interesting or memorable, and as many have pointed out: the editing sucks.
Just watch the airplane chase in this film and the one in _Mission Impossible: Fallout_ back to back, and look at the difference in clarity, camera placement, choreography, creativity in the action beats; it’s a night and day difference.
Even the cinematography and music are nowhere near as good as in _Casino Royale_.

Daniel Craig elevates the script a lot, because without him this would mostly feel like a haphazard attempt to rip off the _Bourne_ franchise.
Normally I’d add Judi Dench to the list of positives, but M has one of the dumbest scenes I’ve ever seen in a Bond film here.
A little context for the scene: James Bond has been a too violent and agressive, the CIA wants him, so M comes over to have Bond arrested.
What happens next? Well, James Bond knocks M’s agents out after he’s handcuffed, M and James meet again, and M’s cool with Bond because he’s “my agent, and I trust him.”
…..
I guess he wasn’t her agent 30 seconds earlier?
Moreover, why would anyone fly to the other side of the world in order to ‘arrest’ their agent, if they don’t want that to happen?
I know why: because they wanted to create a dramatic beat.
But it doesn’t feel earned, and because the movie’s full of moments like that, most viewers will at least subconsciously feel that this isn’t working on a dramatic level.

4/10

I'll make it quick. I watched this movie, and after some while I realised, I had seen this one before.

It's so forgettable, you can skip it without loss. Expect disappointment if you do watch it. It's just a run-off-the-mill action flick, basically.

Well, I loved the theme song, I honestly thought it didn't fit well with the Bond franchise (like the theme of The Living Daylights) but over all I really liked it as a rock song.

And Olga Kurylenko I thought was a great Bond girl, plus they brought back Jeffrey Wright as Felix (and it's a reboot so it's OK he has his legs) but it was nice seeing the same person play Felix twice in a row wasn't it?

But Q, M, and Moneypenny were conspicuously absent weren't they? The plot was pretty convoluted (even for a Craig Era Bond) the action was super choppy because in 08 we were moving into that choppy means action trope that never should have been, and overall the movie stank.

Plus, this is the first time we really got to see Craig's Bond who hates being Bond character come front and center and, honestly, that is the worst way to play Bond.