What's Wrong With Bond

Casino Royale was the best Bond movie ever. The idea was "Bond Begins", but in an updated world - no more goophy gadgets, no more ACME villains, no Ms. Moneypenny, and most importantly, replacing an English gentleman Bond for the other side of English society - the new Bond, the blonde Bond, a rugged English street urchin, the sort of brute who starts bar fights, but adopted by the state and adapted for its ends. His womanizing is cruel, and rather than a slinky spy, he is a Bourne-esque action hero. It did what every good Bond movie does - Bond actually cared about the girl and then she betrayed him...and then she died. Best of all, the first movie was alive with possibility - theater-goers sat thinking, "Is this the last Bond ever?" as Bond put in his retirement. Perhaps we should have left it at that.

It always takes 24-hours to figure out why a film with good action still wasn't that good. The action is definitely good...too much so. The first 45 minutes of the film are 3 almost uninterrupted chase sequences. The movie then settles in for the exposition, but is so intent on weaving the political backdrop and tossing in opulent settings that, ultimately, there's no time for what made Casino Royale so good - Bond. Creating a character. Giving him lines. Bond has almost nothing to say in this film - there's nothing that matches the scene where Bond first meets Vesper or where he picks up Caterina Murino. In fact, that's just my problem - it's 24-hours later and I struggle to remember a single line. I still can't figure out why it's called Quantum of Solace either. Daniel Craig says the word, 'quantum' at some point...I just can't remember why. I knew I should have been suspicious when the title was so bad...call it the "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" rule.

This gaffe, the absence of non-action scenes of worth, shove problems upon the film's pace - there's none of the tension of the card game and few moments of levity. Artistically, even the non-action scenes are cut as action scenes, ruining the iconic images that make a Bond film - the director has dreamed up a few such images, such as a woman killed and covered in oil, but barely leaves this image on the screen long enough for it to register before it's wisked away by the mandatory 6-seconds-or-less cuts of modern film making. The settings are so gorgeous, truly the film's strong point, that this is a great disservice - I'd love to have far more moments with the stills drawn out...it would help slowdown the frenetic pace of the action if nothing else.

The music-video action overload would be fine if the political backdrop spliced in were enough...but it's not. The politics are the standard Hollywood world evinced in the gamut of good to bad movies (Iron Man to The Shooter) - the bad guys are corporations backed by America, this time with a cute environmental twist. The 'blunt instrument' Bond of the first film is now a snide commentator on US policy in Latin America. Salt in a crude parable of the recent election, and voila, you've wasted 30 minutes of what should have been a better film.

This effort undermines the film in a variety of ways. First of all, it takes Bond completely out of character - Bond has always been a patriot and an imperialist, so this turn is unexplained and off-key. When did Bond get this way and why? The reason there isn't an answer is probably simple enough - it's the writer/director talking through his character; the mark of an amateur.

Worse, as is always the case when a film mistakes politics for depth, no matter how subtlely-laid out the political web is, it's still only a few minutes here and there of throwing in the standard 'non-standard' thought of our time. It merely confuses the audience that came for the action whereas those who know something about foreign policy sit in the audience rolling their eyes at yet another trite, flesh-toned if not pinko rant.

The political turn might have worked better if it had done what Dark Knight did - which is to address the headlines rather than the international news on page A6. Blonde Bond is certainly current but remains irrelevant. This Bond was trotted all over the globe working Europe, Central and South America, Russia, Africa...yet the Middle East and Islamic extremism remains a bridge too far. Ian Fleming's Bond worked on the Cold War because that's what was going on. Apparently the modern Bond hasn't graduated to working the important issues yet.

In this, the writer has made the classic Lethal Weapon PC cop-out. For those who forget, four Lethal Weapons got made about the drug business in Los Angeles in the 80's and 90's and yet not a single one involved a Latino or African-American gang as the ultimate villain. White guys in suits were running everything. This involves a certain racist animus - is it not a little insulting to suggest that inevitably white people run everything? At a certain point, this strains credulity. So how long is Bond going to remain on the B Team? Is Bond and his coterie of Bond girls too sexy for the modern Middle East or the filmmakers too craven?

The real problem, though, with all the political narrative is that it gets us away from what this Bond should have been about - Bond. The Bond at the end of the last film was deeply wounded. All of the build-up to this film suggested it was about that damaged Bond. Perhaps it is - I wouldn't know because he has about as many lines as Bill Paxton in Twister. There's almost nothing to Bond's relationship with the curiously half-Russian Bolivian girl, who ends up sitting in as little more than accented eye candy. Compared to the previous film, which had two far richer and more interesting females, the whole range of possiblities involving Bond and trust issues and the rumored 'dark, vengeance seeking' Bond are absent. Characters carried over from the previous film, like Felix Lighter, become wildly different characters with almost nothing to act as the bridge. A revenge scene drops upon us at the end and we're quits.

So what we get is a series of action sequences of varying quality plus a couple of babes and a few good lines. It's just like the old, mediocre Bond...plus better action but minus all the stuff that used to make it Bond. So, in the end, it's just another action movie. Viewed from that lens, it's nice enough, but the first movie raised so many possibilities. Would this film reintroduce darker versions of Bond staples? No. Would this film delve deeper into who Bond is, how he got that way, or how he becomes a more recognizable Bond? Not really. Plot-wise, it builds seemlessly on the previous film - in tone, artistry, and character development is adds a squirt of cheese-in-a-can.

For all the talk that the narrative of Quantum of Solace suggests a trilogy, this film feels more like the recent underwhelming 3rd films of other notable trilogies (Star Wars, Pirates of the Carribean, Spider Man) - overloaded with expensive action and drawn out exposition, empty of the charm that made the previous film(s) better.

Here's hoping that any 'trilogy' film takes the series in some other direction than backwards.