Quantum of Solace

Gen­er­ally, if I’m going to review a sequel I’ll at least try to refresh myself on what hap­pened in the pre­vi­ous install­ment by doing a quick Google search or in extreme cases – when I real­ize after five min­utes there’s no way I’ll under­stand the sec­ond movie with­out inti­mate knowl­edge of the first – actu­ally run­ning up the street and rent­ing it. I made no such effort for the sec­ond film in the newly rebooted Bond fran­chise, Quan­tum of Solace. This was an over­sight I was ini­tially con­cerned about, con­sid­er­ing I couldn’t remem­ber a damn thing about the pre­vi­ous film; luck­ily, it ended up not mak­ing a lick of dif­fer­ence because there were really only two things I needed to know:

1. At the end of the last film, James Bond’s lady friend of the moment appar­ently died an unfor­tu­nate and tragic death.
2. He’s mad as hell and will­ing to kick some seri­ous ass to get retribution.

I seem to recall some crit­ics dis­lik­ing Casino Royale for being too slow and lack­ing in action. That is cer­tainly not the case with this film, as I had to start over three times just to fig­ure out what was hap­pen­ing in the open­ing car chase. This scene was fol­lowed by a foot chase, which was fol­lowed by a knife fight, which was fol­lowed by a boat chase, which was fol­lowed by a scene sug­gest­ing – but not con­firm­ing – Bond and some broad were get­ting busy in the bed­room. In the first ten min­utes I found myself seri­ously ques­tion­ing why he wasn’t, at the very least, uncon­scious due to blunt head trauma. Later I found myself ask­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions about his ribs, legs, nose, and the knife wound in his arm which he appar­ently suf­fered through the whole movie with.

But all that is beside the point. What’s impor­tant is that this is likely the most action packed Bond movie to date and all that action is glo­ri­ously filmed in a gritty street fight­ing style with min­i­mal explo­sions and lots of punch­ing, shoot­ing, and table break­ing. Look­ing back on the film I have no idea how we got from point A to point B – let alone to point C – but appar­ently the plot line was lit­tle more than a vehi­cle to allow Bond to get into brawls and gun fights in dif­fer­ent loca­tions, and appar­ently I loved every sec­ond of it.

This is Daniel Craig’s sec­ond appear­ance in the fran­chise and he con­tin­ues to do the role jus­tice by por­tray­ing a gritty, con­fi­dent, and obsti­nate Bond who is will­ing to do what­ever it takes to get the job done, pro­vided the job involves killing just about every­one he comes across. Never has James Bond been por­trayed more bru­taly or more hon­estly. In the moments between fist fights and shootouts we catch rare glimpses of a spy who is suf­fer­ing not only from three cracked ribs, a bro­ken nose, and a knife wound which is prob­a­bly infected by now, but who is also suf­fer­ing from a bro­ken heart.

I liked Quan­tum of Solace, but I do admit…sometimes I still miss Sean Con­nery.

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