 |
The problem, fortunately, is not with Daniel Craig. As in Casino Royale, Craig cuts an imposing figure as the famed superspy. The problem is the cinematic structure in which he is set loose and the narrow parameters in which he's allowed to act. Quantum of Solace finds Bond, stoically reeling from the death of Vesper Lynd, sets forth in pursuit of the responsible organization and finds himself enmeshed in a conspiracy involving unctuous environment-minded corporate bigwig Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), an attempted coup in Bolivia and a smoldering femme fatale named Camille (Olga Kurylenko) with a burning yen for revenge similar to Bond's. A fine Bond film could be spun from this premise, yet that would require a sense of lightness entirely missing here. Instead, we get James Bond incarnated as a hulking automaton fueled by rage, bloodlust and the occasional cocktail.
In retrospect, Casino Royale seems like a small miracle - it knew where the series had gotten off track, what still worked and what needed to come back. It carved away at the clutter and cacophony of the Brosnan era, tightening and paring until all that remained was the thrill of the cat-and-mouse dynamic between the forces of good and evil, the iconic cool of its main character and an unexpected dose of heart. Quantum of Solace represents an attempt to chisel further, to get down to the bones of the character, but director Marc Forster and the cadre of screenwriters whittle the story down to the point where it's just a skeletal frame holding many quick, brutal acts of violence. Psychology holds little sway here; Solace is a series of setpieces in search of a unifying principle.
This visceral approach makes the hiring of Forster for the director's chair a baffling decision. Common logic would say that the director of Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland and The Kite Runner, a man who specializes in Oscar-hopeful prestige projects, would be less than ideal to take on a rock-em-sock-em action extravaganza. The idea behind getting Forster, presumably, was to use the action sequences as psychological shorthand - a window through the gritty exterior into the damaged soul of Bond. There's one major obstacle to the success of that idea: Marc Forster, from the evidence here, knows next to nothing about directing action scenes.
His staging is unimaginative and his coverage is abysmal; at bottom, he lacks an innate sense of how to move bodies through space in an efficient manner. Time and again, he tries to cover these deficiencies with lightning cutting, paint-mixer camerawork and whip-pans galore. This effectively disorients the viewer, sacrificing coherence for immediacy; while such a strategy can work in the short term, over time the wise viewer (whom, I will note, remains puzzled by the continued acclaim of Paul Greengrass's Bourne Cuisinart movies) will wonder why he's not being allowed to see any action shot for more than a second.
Lost in the drive towards ruthless spectacle, sadly, is the kind of film that Forster might have made worthwhile. There's a couple of short scenes - a harsh bit where Bond punctures an adversary's femoral artery and disinterestedly holds the struggling man down until he bleeds out, a night flight that finds a sozzled, insomnia-stricken Bond painfully guzzling Vesper cocktails - that hint at the peek behind the facade promised by the premise. Craig, to his credit, plays Bond with a clenched-jaw steeliness and fiery determination that says at least he's trying to craft that better, darker movie anyway. (His professionalism only makes Kurylenko, ostensibly powered by similar impulses, look that much more inadequate.) But that's not the real heartbreaking thing.
What really irks is this: More than an examination of an avenging demon capable of towering cruelty in the name of righting wrongs, Quantum of Solance had within its grasp the ability to become the bracing photo-negative flipside of Casino Royale. If the previous film, by its return to square one, becomes a celebration of the James Bond character and all the mythos he embodies, this could have then built off the climactic introduction of very un-Bondian tragedy and turned out a sober example of why that character no longer fits in the world today. It isn't like I'm pining for some imaginary possibility - I'm pulling straight from the film.
On at least two occasions, goverment functionaries tell white-hat characters that the muddy nature of modern geopolitics often times involves otherwise well-meaning entities jumping into bed with obvious crooked bastards like Greene. James Bond is an icon, but he's also a product of the Cold War, of good guy-bad guy dichotomies and knowing that the forces of good will win out. Those dichotomies, for the most part, no longer exist. The script acknowledges this time and again, making its villain an environmentalist who wishes to gain profit and power from said environmentalism, bringing up the spectre of chessboard South American power politics, and essentially turning Bond into a rogue agent representing nobody but his own sense of offended righteousness.
It's all right up on the screen, your psychologically fascinating and thematically rich Bond masterpiece, and nobody bothered to pull it together. Instead, they made a lean, muscle-bound and entirely stagnant action-packed who-cares.The loose scraps of potential flying amidst the whirlwind of haphazardly-choreographed chaos and ever-widening explosions offer little solace.
- Steve Carlson
 |
It’s not that Forster and a gaggle of screenwriters don’t try to live up to Campbell’s Casino Royale; they make numerous attempts to recapture the grimmer, darker tone of that film, and from time to time they succeed. But Forster, whose previous work includes such notable action movies as Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction, simply isn’t a good fit for the franchise; from an opening car chase that’s both incomprehensibly edited and sluggish – the sports cars on display handle as nimbly as tanks – to a final confrontation that tries desperately to supply a kind of poignancy that the previous hundred minutes have failed to, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the wrong man is behind the camera.
Granted, he would have been helped by a stronger script. Solace, written by the same team as Royale and based on an idea by producer Michael G. Wilson, puts Bond (Daniel Craig) to work foiling the usual grandiose and needlessly complex schemes of supervillain Dominic Greene (Matthieu Almaric) and the international criminal syndicate that initiated the events of the last film and led his lover to her doom. If only that was all it did.
Unfortunately, the story is choked by a number of unnecessary subplots, including the revenge fantasies of the latest Bond girl (Olga Kurlyenko), the growing conscience of series mainstay Felix Leiter (Jeffery Wright), the thorny relationship between Bond and his superior officer (Judi Dench), and an annoying amount of behind-the-scenes political wrangling. Forster struggles to keep the film hurtling forward while juggling these different plot threads, as well as the requisite action set pieces, all in considerably less than two hours; it’s an order many accomplished directors would fail to fill, and Quantum seems decidedly rushed – it’s rare that any of the film’s major moments, even the ones that involve its supposedly weighty theme of the toll vengeance can take, are allowed a few breaths to make a real impact.
That being said, Forster doesn’t do much with what he has, and he doesn’t seem to understand what a Bond movie calls for. Most of the action sequences aren’t handled much better than that Bourne rip-off of a car chase; not only are they difficult to follow – at one point Bond survives a speedboat chase by means that are an utter mystery to me – but they lack the series’ trademark sense of wit and genuine daring. The same holds true for the film as a whole; Forster is an unusually heavyhanded director, and most of the film’s attempts at humor thud like a sledgehammer hitting rusty metal.
He doesn’t do much better in the film’s darker moments, such as a cat and mouse chase that takes place during a performance of Tosca; Forster cuts between the chase and the performance so hamfistedly that he might as well have intercut a huge banner that read “SIGNIFICANCE” while he was at it. Late in the film, when Kurlyenko has gotten her revenge, everything goes slo-mo as we’re forced to acknowledge the revelation that, yes, killing people is kind of shitty. And the less said about the last scene in the film, where Bond finally receives his satisfaction by cornering a character that’s barely been mentioned in the entire film, the better.
At least he fares better with the actors. Craig is just as good as he was in Royale, conveying a wide array of emotions while his face remains as cold and hard as flint; despite not having much to do, and being subjected to a botched introduction, Almaric is a suitably creepy villain, channeling Peter Lorre through the body of an effete, reptilian playboy; Dench, Wright and Giancarlo Gianinni all manage to make sizeable impressions despite limited screen time.
But ultimately, despite having the best actor to fill Bond’s shoes since Sean Connery and a cast previous Bond directors would have killed for, Forster simply can’t deliver. It’s not as if he’s alone in this regard; in the past, veteran directors like Roger Spottiswoode and Michael Apted have struggled to portray a truly iconic character while also dealing with the notorious meddling of producer Wilson. In fact, there’s only one director who has proven himself equal to the task; if Wilson and the execs at MGM don’t want to face the same diminishing returns as they did with the Pierce Brosnan cycle of Bonds, they should keep his number on speed dial.
- Chris Anderson
- Halo-17 Staff (0 comments)