2008 - Quantum Of Solace

Alternate Title - Quantum Of Plot

PG13 - 106 minutes

Director - Marc Forster

Stars - Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright

Review written: 10.8.2015

Prologue: I saw this movie once a year or so after it was released. Didn’t find anything to love about it. Didn’t hate it, just instantly forgot everything about it. I thought the title was stupid and so was the water monopoly plot. That’s really all I remember about it so this will really be an almost fresh viewing this time around. Here goes…:

This movie starts out like most Bond movies, he’s involved in an unexplained action sequence that will probably be loosely tied into the rest of the movie. It’s a really well done car chase sequence. It’s no Ronin but it’ll do. I feel like this scene is to make-up for all the people that complained about the lack of action in Casino Royale. God forbid you spend a Bond reboot getting to know the main character. Twist…This chase sequence ties it to the LAST Bond movie not this one exactly. He has Mr. White in the trunk, who he kidnapped at the end of Casino Royale.
The theme song is boring for the most part. Don’t know if I’ve ever heard it outside of watching the movie the first time. The credit sequence is also boring for the most part. Lot’s of deserts being turned into naked ladies. Then a global grid covers the screen and I’m pretty sure the feet of the women makes a swastika.

Jack White and Alicia Keys made the theme song. I literally didn’t know who it was until there was a credit for it. It’s not horrible, just forgettable.
Siena, Italy: Bond turns White over to M and someone calls her Ma’am. Said it more like Mum though. I guess she’s the mother of the agency? But then why is M later a man? Does it stand for Man later? Confusing.
Daniel Craig looks like a sun burned Alfred E. Neuman from Mad Magazine with straw hair.
Mr. White delivers the line made for the trailer. “The first thing you should know about us is that we have people everywhere…” Cut to a man killing agents and M falls down. This all leads to Bond chasing White through a crowded festival and if there’s one thing I hate in action movies it’s super tight shots with fast movements. The kind of shots where you really can’t tell what the fuck is happening. I know why they do it, to create a sense of panic and chaos but all it does it make me tune out until I can actually see their fucking movie. Braveheart is an awesome movie but it’s super guilty of this. It’s really a shame because when you can actually make sense of the action in this movie so far, it’s pretty awesome work from the stunt coordinators. The entire sequence I thought he was chasing White but it was chasing the dude that was working for White. I had to rewind to find out that White got shot when it all started. I debated rewriting this all but said fuck it because it’s the movies fault. I’m flawless.
Pretty sure they introduced the new Q but didn’t feel like really letting us know about it. Maybe they decided not to have him be Q after seeing his boring performance. Not sure. Don’t care. He leads Bond to a dude that is handling traced money from Le Chiffre. I like how much they are tying this movie to the previous one. That’s one thing I felt was lacking from all previous Bond movies. I get that they can all stand on their own but I feel if you’re going to do a series why not tie them together with overarching storylines like a TV series?
Bond immediately kills another dude that he’s following. This Bond is a fucking psycho and will kill anyone without a second thought.
Camille picks him up in a Fiat, not exactly a Bond car. Seeing her face scares me because she was in both video game movie abortions Max Payne and Hitman. She works for Dominic Green, who I assume is the main villain of this flick. Everyone in this movie is overly tan with weird puppet hair.
Rory Kinnear is in this movie. That shouldn’t be anything special but it’s funny to see him be serious after I watched him fuck a pig in Black Mirror. Go watch it. It’s fucked up.
Dominic Greene trades away his woman to General Medrano in part of a deal so that Greene gets a huge chunk of useless desert. Or so we think… Either way, I’ve tried to trade girlfriends for shit before and it never goes as smoothly as it did in this movie. It leads to the best boat chase sequence since Face/Off. That sounds like a joke but the boat chase in Face/Off was pretty awesome. Another one that goes on the list is the chase from The Man From Uncle movie.
What this movie lacks in plot and interesting characters, it makes up for in well done action sequences and music. They blend in new styles of music with the old Bond themes flawlessly.
Jeffrey Wright and David Harbour are both with the CIA, tracking Greene. They make a deal with Greene that they will stop a coup in exchange for any oil that Greene finds. Greene also asks them to kill Bond for him. So, just so we’re all on the same page, everyone in the entire cast except for Camille now knows that Bond is a British secret agent. Secret agent. Secret… everyone knows.
While looking at Greene’s face I can’t help but think that they purposely chose an actor that was as equally attractively ugly as Daniel Craig. No way was this a coincidence. They’re both the same. I can’t tell if they’re ugly dudes that happen to look good or attractive dudes that have ugly features. Either way it’s a marvel of casting.
While watching the opera sequence I can’t help but yearn for a Bond movie that takes place in Des Moines, Iowa or Duluth, Minnesota, or Saskatchewan, Canada. Someplace fucking boring and just see what they can do with what they have.
M had an entire conversation with Bond while she was getting ready for a bath. I was scared that she would actually get in the bath during the conversation. Not to say that Judi Dench isn’t an attractive lady, I just don’t wanna see her all soapy and wet.
Talamone, Italy: turns out Mathis was innocent. Bond pulls him in for “one last job” basically. We all know how that ends up in movies. I don’t expect Mathis to get back to his trophy wife. Later Mathis reveals that he is a pill-popping sad sack of shit and Bond is an alcoholic.
There is an agent with strawberry blonde hair named…Strawberry Fields. It’s been a while since we’ve had a stupid female name in a Bond movie. Christmas Jones is the last one I can think of. Although, Halle Berry as Jinx Johnson was pretty stupid too. Bond fucks her off screen with seemingly no resistance. He’s already too good at it.
This movie reminds me of the Timothy Dalton Bond movies. Nothing much is happening, a lot of the scenes are one-on-one conversations between characters in which they discuss the plot that isn’t happening and a man threatens a woman, then cut to an action sequence, Bond is a psycho, South American plot and the movie moves slowly but somehow isn’t bad. It won’t be memorable but it still isn’t terrible.
Jeffrey Wright looks like he’s on painkillers in this movie. So far he’s only sat in chairs and looked disinterested in everything. Maybe he raided Mathis’ pill collection. Maybe he did that when Mathis was killed because he’s in Bond’s trunk somehow. Bond uses him as a shield because he’s a dick. Turns out Mathis was actually alive but Bond didn’t bother to check because he’s a selfish dick. He actually gets Mathis killed. This is only the beginning of a series of dick moves by Bond. Bond kills the cops after using Mathis’ body as a shield, then he stands around in the alley as Mathis dies, then Bond literally throw Mathis’ body into the fucking trash and robs his corpse of like $40.
Long airplane sequence that makes the one from Temple Of Doom look even worse than it already was. As enjoyable as it is, it was so over the top.
Greene is gathering all these heads of major companies and it’s starting to feel like this is “1% The Movie”.
Camille is really after General Medrano because he killed her father, raped her mother and sister, strangled them in front of her and then burned the house down. It is such a sad story that just keeps upping the ante on itself. “Then he pissed on the ashes of the house, had the ashes bottled and sold them as a cure for cancer to my grandmother, who then died of that cancer. When my grandfather found out the news of her death, he died of a heart attack. Then when we buried him, my cousin was a pallbearer and fell into the grave, the casket fell on top of him, crushing him. Two more cousins died trying to die him out. Soon, we were having funerals for people that died during the previous funeral. The cycle is still happening to this day. So yeah, I’m pretty pissed at Medrano.”
Bond and Camille find an underground river and now they know that Greene is really after the water supply. They show a sad montage of thirsty locals before boarding a bus. Poor people are gross. Let’s get back to watching rich snobs play high-stakes poker and fucking models. Poor? Icky!
Bond gets back to non-poor civilization and is all muddy and gross from the trip but I feel like that’s what he should actually look like. That’s how Daniel Craig showed up to set. M is there with an oil soaked dead girl on a bed that reference the dead girl in gold from Goldfinger. Bond escapes from custody and this is what makes Daniel Craig so good as Bond. He can pull off the charming side and he can pull off the smooth guy in an action sequence better than any Bond before him.
This is a shorter Bond movie and I still felt like it should have ended by now. But I looked down and there was exactly 20 minutes left. This movie drags its feet a little too much at certain points.
The second Medrano takes over as dictator of Bolivia, he signs the land over to Greene and is blackmailed instantly by Greene because he owns 60% of Bolivia’s water supply. Yes…this movie is about water. Medrano gets over his anger by just flat-out raping a girl the second he gets some free time. Dude really loves to rape. It’s always nice to see someone be passionate about their hobby. Then he tries to kill/rape Camille. He’s like the Michael Jordan of rape. Just can’t be stopped. Wait…his two on screen rapes didn’t pan out… he’s the John Stockton of rape…
Camille kills Medrano while Bond holds Greene over a ledge by just his hair. The entire place erupts into fire for some reason. Leading me to believe that every rape Medrano performs must lead to arson. It’s his finishing move even from beyond the grave. Instead of fleeing the fire, Bond and Camille just sit in the middle of an on fire building. Severely stupid. They should be dead.
Instead of killing Greene, Bond drops him off in the middle of the desert with a can of motor oil. I wish we could see the scene where he chugs it like the big dude in Over The Top.
Camille tells Bond, “I wish I could set you free. But your prison is in there…” And she points at his head. Stupid. Bond seems angry when he’s fighting but not that horribly damaged. He didn’t even get to fuck Camille. What a shame.
M is surprised, almost amazed that Bond didn’t kill a dude at the end. This should be a clue to her that he’s unfit for duty. She tells Bond that they found Greene in the Bolivia desert with oil in his stomach and two bullets in his head. I really want to see what the fuck happened there.
Overall, decent Bond movie. Not a whole lot of plot happening at any given time. You never really get a sense of the evil that the villain is supposedly perpetrating. It’s more an implied sense of economic collapse in an already unstable area of the world. That’s a fine plot in a Bond book but it’s lackluster to see it actually happening. Looking back, I’m already forgetting shit from this movie. I don’t remember what happened to Strawberry Fields. (Was she the one drowned in oil?) I can’t remember how the whole thing with Jeffrey Wright ended. I think he just wasn’t in the movie anymore. This movie is decent but suffers from being very very slippery in the memory bank.