Quantum Of Solace

We went to see the latest James Bond movie at the weekend - Quantum Of Solace. Despite the odd title, it's the sequel to Casino Royale (the second one) and starts off from where that finished up. If you haven't seen Casino Royale, then I wouldn't read any further but here's a short description of the plot…

With Vesper gone and the mysterious Mr. White captured, the British Secret Service learns that a previously unknown organization called Quantum has insinuated itself into almost every layer of business and government on the planet, including themselves.

When all the evidence points at Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) as the face of Quantum, Bond (Daniel Craig) goes on a mission of vengeance and even alienates himself from the service and M (Judi Dench).

With Quantum gaining control of seemingly worthless tracts of land around the globe, Bond teams up with a Bolivian girl called Camille (Olga Kurylenko) to try and solve the mystery behind their operation.

The Bond character has definitely changed. Gone is the debonair spy of Connory or Moore's time and in is the licensed thug that is Daniel Craig. Also gone is Q and that is a pity as a visit to the quartermaster always added a little lighter moment to the story. What we have now in these two movies is a much harder, probably more realistic, storyline. There's also a serious lack of sex here as well and, while it was never explicit in previous movies, it was always a given that Bond would get more than his fair share of seduction along the way.

On top of all that there is no really evil arch villain of the piece either. Dominic Greene is more like a corporate leech and he has no huge thug of a henchman to back him up either. He is a pretty cold fish but just lacks that element of seeking global domination that should be the raison d'etre of any Bond villain. Not that all of this is bad, it's just different but it doesn't really seem like a Bond movie so much. To offset this uneasy situation, there's loads of action - roof chases, car chases, boat chases, hand-to-hand fighting, explosions, etc.

Quantum Of Solace is a reasonable sequel to Casino Royale and finished off the story well enough although I suspect they could have squeezed it into one movie easily enough.

Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller
My Rating: 7/10