Quantum of Solace

Congratulations! You've managed to reinvent your Bond franchise after the tired old boy had sipped his last martini, drove his last fast car, and bedded his last exotic hottie. This new Bond is vulnerable and violent at the same time, a wounded animal that was willing to give up the whole spy life for Vesper Lynd, a woman who betrayed him. This is supposed to explain why Bond's such a cold-hearted bastard, and it blazed an exciting if somewhat jarring new path for the Bond films.

The challenge with reinvention is that there is a blurry line between following the new Bond to his logical conclusion and retaining the quintessential elements that constitute Bond. Or to put it another way, if you constantly make Bond different with each film, he's not really James Bond anymore.

Quantum of Solace chose to continue Bond's (Daniel Craig) destructive path from the first film, picking up where Casino Royale left off. Bond tracks the shadowy global conspiracy (Quantum) that has infiltrated Her Majesty's Secret Service. That's right, there's a double agent in double-oh-seven's midst, and only M (Dame Judy Dench) seems to be the least bit concerned about the entire organization being utterly compromised. This is just one of Quantum's many incongruent plot points that are resolved with "LOOK! EXPLOSIONS!" to divert the audience's attention.

Our resident villain is a pop-eyed Buscemi look-alike named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who runs...wait for it...Greene Planet, an environmental organization that is secretly arranging deals for oil. But actually, it's about water. Greene's Blofeld-ian murder signature is to drown his victims in oil. It's not nearly as cool as it sounds.

Bond's supposed lust-interest is an agent named Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), who saunters onto the screen in boots and an overcoat. With her bright red hair, Fields seems like a great romantic foil for Bond. When Bond asks her first name, it's "Fields. Just Fields." No Strawberry. And here we come to the problem: Quantum of Solace seems embarrassed to be a Bond film.

Every opportunity for Bond to be suave gets glossed over. He just commands women, like Fields, into his bed. He kills every bad guy he's supposed to capture. When his license gets revoked, he blithely ignores M's commands. When he attends an opera, Bond lurks in the rafters like some kind of murderous roadie. Instead of cleverly tricking the Quantum cabal into revealing themselves, he crashes their secret meeting and then guns down their goons.

In the first film, Bond's blundering and brutal tactics were excusable because he was new. It was a great way to reboot the franchise with the promise that, over time, Bond would transform into the elegant, suave killer we've come to know and love. It's a particularly American approach, the idea that even killers can better themselves through hard work. But with Quantum of Solace, Bond is so bereft of actual development that he gets a proxy instead: Camille (Olga Kurylenko), an exotic hottie whom he doesn't get to bed.

The movie goes south from there: inexplicable bad guy meeting that brings everyone together in one place, flaming deathtraps that Bond brute forces his way out of, and a bad guy who physically can't compete with Bond but tries to make up for it by being really, really nuts. The clear advantage Bond has over Greene is obvious; it's like a jock beating up a nerd at supervillain convention.

In the end, Bond finally meets up with the agent responsible for Lynd's betrayal, Yusef Kabira. SPOILER ALERT: After all the beatings, blasting, smashing, crunching, and punching, the movie concludes with a quippy aside and some hurt feelings.

Are you kidding me? By the end of the movie I was so frustrated that I wanted to see Bond seriously #$% up the one guy who could arguably be held accountable for destroying the love of his life. Instead of using Camille as parable to tell the tale of Bond's self-destructive path, Quantum of Solace should have STARTED with Bond leaving Kabira in a body bag. Or multiple bags.

Now that we've gotten the murderous quest for vengeance out of the way, can we get back to Bond being at least slightly civilized, seducing hot women, and killing dangerous villains with awesome technology? Please?