FILM REVIEW:Quantum of Solace

It’s a seething Bond who’s out for blood at the wounded heart of Quantum of Solace, making director Marc Forster’s exemplary follow-on from 2006’s franchise reboot, Casino Royale, a 007 outing unlike any before.

Solace hits the ground running – well, throttling, really, plonking us passenger’s side for a sound-barrier-threatening motorchase that plays like the most breath-clutching car commercial road and safety standards ensure you’ll never see. We last left Ian Fleming’s tux-favouring secret agent towering, machine gun in hand, over the newly-kneecapped Mr White (Jesper Christensen), a seemingly upper-tier player in the mysterious organisation giving the MI6 more than just cause for concern.

This follow-up – and that’s what this is, an honest extension of both the narrative throughlines and character motivations of Casino Royale – picks up mere minutes after that last block-busting installment (a fact that’s soon made startlingly clear by one hell of a revalation, that also claims one of the film’s few genuine bellylaughs), making this an oddity amongst Bond films in more ways than one: this is the series’ first-ever direct sequel.

Daniel Craig’s rough-and-tumble take on the celebrated supersleuth is again put to cracking use, with 007 here charting a corpse-littered course to the thing he wants – no, needs – most: cold, single-minded revenge. On the receiving end of Bond’s bone-snapping beeline is oily environmental conservationalist and corporate schemer, Dominic Greene (played with self-ingratiating smarm by The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s Mathieu Amalric), who seems to have had a slick-fingered hand in the demise of Bond’s love, Royale’s involuntarily double-dealing Vesper Lynd (Eva Green).

Olga Kurylenko’s Camille, Quantum’s long-legged lead femme, marks a refreshing spin on the traditional Bond Girl – with her similar hunger for brutally exacted vengeance, she’s kindred spirit rather than lusty, sex-dishing plaything; a passing, head-clearing flirtation with a comely auburn-haired fellow agent (Gemma Arterton) is the sole concession Forster’s film makes to the franchise’s long-standing ‘Rocks Off AT LEAST Once Per Movie’ clause.

With its focus on 007’s troubled headspace as much as his license to kill, Forster proves himself an inspired choice behind Quantum’s myriad cameras, his (mostly) winning history of inventive, moderately-budgeted character dramas (Monster’s Ball, Stranger Than Fiction) well-equipping him to plumb the dark psychological depths of our battered and brooding hero.

The filmmaker also reveals a previously untested knack for staging a scrap, with Bond taking to land, sea and air in a series of savage setpieces, culminating in a staggeringly-staged fist-to-axe fight in a collapsing, desert-bound hotel inferno. The sheer quick-spliced brutality of an earlier ‘anything-that-isn’t-bolted-down’ brawl is right up there with the best blues of the Bourne series, and – most interestingly – Forster introduces a genuine artistry to a series not conventionally known for its poetic flourishes – witness a mid-way pursuit at an Austrian opera house and those location-specific intertitles for proof.

Of course, all genre-eschewing deviations aside, this is still a Bond movie, and, true to form, a few reason-bothering plot quirks do arrive, but if you concede to their stylishness (an oil-licked cadaver on expensive white sheets, a conference call amidst a grand-scale production of Tosca), you’ll be more than willing to allow Forster and scripters Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Roger Wade a handful of narrative flamboyances – after all, who wants to watch a bunch of rich wankers simply take out a booth at the local Starbucks? For the most, however, this is grittier than guts, a trimmer, grimmer James Bond, and so long as Craig’s pocketing the keys to the Aston Martin, the fit is certainly a good one.