Saturday, November 8, 2008

007 Quantum Of Solace- Review

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This film catches Ian Fleming's hero on the run, keeps him running, and zips along with a jolting, almost offensive velocity, catching its ragged breath in the rare opportunity for dialogue. Fans of the series who like to slow down and savour the scenery, enjoying a drip-feed of dodgy innuendo, may consider this a rude awakening - it's the shortest Bond movie to date, and easily the most terse.

It's briefly to London for some Paul Haggis-scripted soundbites about our changing planet, and then to Haiti, where we meet pouting Bolivian agent Camille (Olga Kurylenko) and villain du jour Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a petulant eco-criminal busily finessing the oil and water reserves of South America for his own gain. Amalric, who with every goggle-eyed smirk cements his credentials to star in a Roman Polanski biopic, brings a wickedly childish spite to this role, certainly proving a more interesting foil to Bond than his latest foxy-but-cross female sidekick.

James, of course, is still hung up over the betrayal and demise of Vesper in the last instalment, motivating a morose six-martini binge while he's flying across the Atlantic, as well as his avoidance here of any serious entanglements, save those in stray lengths of rope dangling from the roofs of Tuscan churches. He isn't alone: Camille, having had her family raped and burnt alive by a deposed Bolivian dictator, also has her mind on other things. Instead, there's a just-for-fun fling with MI6 emissary Gemma Arterton, who pitches up looking like a John le Carré strippogram in a trenchcoat, and exits in a homage to Shirley Goldfinger Eaton which had me reaching for bad oil puns. Crude? Unrefined? It's not exactly slick.

What's clever, and slick, and even a little ingenious about the movie, though, is how it postpones Bond's Vesper vendetta by submerging it beneath his present tasks - he gets an angry kick out of scuttling this international cabal of utility profiteers, who in the barmiest conceit get to negotiate through earpieces while seated for a state-of-the-art production of Tosca.

If there was any remaining doubt that the world is bartered and sold by people who can afford opera tickets, it's roundly dispelled, though how Amalric persuades his backers that Haiti, of all places, is some kind of model example for neocapitalist progress leaves us just a little foxed. "I don't give a s--- about the CIA," announces Judi Dench, inimitably, but it's not the best line in the movie: those are all the ones on Daniel Craig's face, particularly the deep vertical groove between his eyebrows when he's found yet another score to settle.




Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, and the movie takes more part as a Drama, the story line drags at times and we cant hear the 007's Theme music at any time.



Rating : 2.5/5

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