Quantum of Solace, 3.5 stars
Saw the newest installment of the recently rebooted James Bond-franchise on Sunday evening. Quantum of Solace is by no means a hollow sequel to the masterful Casino Royale, but not as close to an action masterpiece as Martin Campbell’s take was.
The plot is very busy, and for the most of the 1:50 running time there’s plenty of things going on. The action starts directly off the final scene of the preceding movie, and moves neatly to a nicely juxtaposed urban chase / traditional horse race in Siena.
Pretty much immediately the movie starts moving in uncomfortably many directions at once, and probably works out to a bewildering experience to those not familiar with the plot and characters of Casino Royale. I would have definitely appreciated a brief flashback of sorts.
Quantum of Solace remains a single-minded solo vengeance quest for its duration, and thus is closer to the Bourne films, as opposed to the wide-reaching predecessor. Even though the plot is packed with more or less credible spices of a humongous global conspiracy, the adversaries seem to have selected quite a few odd tools for their schemes.
Daniel Craig continues to excel as Bond, though this time the role borders on one-dimensional. Olga Kurylenko is convincing enough, and far preferable to recent Bond girls (up and until Goldeneye’s Izabella Scorupco). On the villain-side Mathieu Almaric is good as a slimy frenchman, but never quite up to the level of greatest of adversaries.
Further bonus points for creative use of typography and a neat touch-based intelligence visualization engine.
And minus points for too aggressive cutting in some of the action scenes. At times the proceedings were rather hard to follow. And there are plenty of those scenes, some bearing a close resemblance to things seen before, though some do feature novel concepts.
Three and a half stars. That’s half a 007. Not bad. But definitely something to improve on in the forthcoming part three of the quantum-saga, altogether twenty-third Bond-movie.
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