Rating of
2/4
"Quantum Of Solace" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 03/19/12
After Casino Royale reset the franchise and breathed fresh life into the character of Bond, Quantum immediately follows it up with a well staged but overly familiar bullet-riddled car chase. Bond is then chased by men with foreign accents atop motorcycles/speedboats/jet fighters and jumps out of a plane without a parachute. Again. Female agents are once more demoted to dolly birds who hurtle into Bond's bed with such ferocious speed they threaten to break the sound barrier, only to instantaneously wind up in a body bag (as usual) and he battles a shadowy multinational organization with a hidden agenda but with a rather dreary nerd in command instead of a cat stroking cartoon character. The problem with Quantum Of Solace is it makes the mistake of making Bond go rogue; this always sounds good, but it never works. When he goes off on one, he just turns into a one dimensional killing machine and it removes all the moral ambiguity and grey areas that make 007 interesting. The plot is little more than chase-fight-chase-fight-chase-fight, all of the supporting characters are dispensable and irrelevant and the editing is migraine inducing; I doubt that there's a shot that lasts more than three seconds for the entire duration of the film! Instead of continuing with the new direction introduced in the previous film, QOS is very much business as usual and although it does have enough action to make it feel like a treat on a superficial level, it's pretty much all empty calories.
