Over the weekend Poppy and I went and saw the new James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace. It made $70 million opening weekend, which is a pretty huge take this time of year. Therefore logic would tell you that it is an awesome movie. Now you may call me illogical, but I think it was a steaming pile of crap.
Casino Royale was SUCH a great movie that I truly felt this would follow its lead. It doesn’t. Sure it starts off with a decent action packed sequence with Bond‘s Astor Martin getting riddled with bullet holes. Of course there are exciting chase scenes across rooftops and dangling hand to hand combat on scaffolding in the vein of Casino Royale. Of course there was the typical Bond girl, Gemma Arterton as Strawberry Fields. Of course there are hurdles that Bond must overcome, such as M rescinding all his credit cards and passports. Of course there is a mystery to be solved… and what exactly that is still remains a mystery which is part of the problem.
After the opening sequence you don’t see another Astor Martin again… I guess they didn’t pony up for product placement. We already saw scaffold fighting in Casino Royale where the choreography and cinematography was much better. The typical Bond girl was joined by the atypical Bond girl, Olga Kurylenko as Camille, who seemed to be shedding her outer skin on her back like a snake for the better part of the movie… which you have to conclude on your own is from a fire that killed her entire family but her and hence her blood vendetta against the typical Bond disposable dictator. There was also something about oil and water and ecological impacts… which really I think was the main plot but got relegated to a sub-plot by the “discovery” of a group known as Quantum and the need of uncovering this “organization we know nothing about”.
I really had this dreadful Lord of the Rings feeling watching this movie. I don’t think Pierce Brosnan’s Bond walked the distances over his entire career as much as Daniel Craig’s Bond did in this one movie. It was a movie about walking… through a desert… because people want oil… but it’s really water… and we need to build hotels in deserts with explosive fuel cells because that’s how rich our country is. Blah blah fucking blah.
The girls? Well Strawberry Fields was a severe waste of time because there was zero investment in her character development… and really all they wanted to do was dip her in some dark chocolate, call it oil, lay her on a bed, and make her act dead. Huge waste of killer legs in a killer skirt wearing killer boots. I don’t even consider Camille a Bond girl. She’s one of those badly developed raging stereotypes who witnesses the rape of their family and their execution by arson, but lives through it all to miraculously become a Secret Service Agent for their own country while still harboring a blood vendetta… and amazingly not once does she curse in Spanish being a native of a South American country. Yeah… real realistic. A real Latina would curse at you for bringing home vegetable oil instead of motor oil… so I tend to think they would be a little more intense if you doused their family in kerosene and lit the match.
The gadgets? Well… oh wait. There were none. With the exception of Microsoft style table computers… there are no gadgets. In fact, there are no gadgets and I don’t even remember seeing Q there. Maybe he was… relegated to a corner or something as the entire Bond 007 mythos seems to have been.
As for this group Quantum… well that remains to be seen I guess. They may be looking to extend this storyline into future movies… which I seriously suggest they hurry it up. If this was a television show, you’d be on the list of shows to replace… but this isn’t a television show. This is James “Double-Oh Mother Fucking Seven” Bond.
Either do it right… or don’t bother doing it.
