Other Reviews in this Series.
Director: Marc Forster
Writers: Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade
Cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright
Runtime: 106 mins.
2008
Quantum of Solace is not un-entertaining. This is one of the two compliments that I will give it. The other compliment is that Marc Forster has this directorial tic that I enjoy: he ends all of his action scenes with moments of stillness where the sound mixing bottoms out and lets you catch a breath. Unfortunately it is pleasant in part because the action scenes are not very good.
It's hard to put a finger on exactly what went wrong with Quantum, but every which way you look is a decision that seems at least a little bit wrongheaded. First and foremost, Quantum is as far as I'm aware the only James Bond film that functions as a direct sequel to its predecessor. As in, the story elements and character arcs are so dependent upon what's come before that a newbie walking into this movie would have nothing to latch onto but confusion and boredom. As easy as it is to blame the studios for this decision... well, we should probably blame the studios. Bond films have always absorbed and reappropriated current Hollywood trends, and this time around they bit the bait of serialization. In an era of sequels, and at the cusp of shared universes (Iron Man was also released in 2008), it only made sense for Bond to go after the unfinished business of Vesper Lynd's untimely death.
This was absolutely the wrong decision, and it's apparent the writers weren't entirely on board.* They must have believed they had already told an entire story in Casino Royale, with no open doors or loose ends, and they had. Thus Quantum feels perfunctory, as if its entire narrative exists for the purpose of cleaning up a mess that never needed to be spilled. The characters are bored. The actors are bored. Nobody has a relationship with anybody else beyond "don't do this" or "help me do this." And everybody is pissy.
*At times literally. Due to the writer's strike, Daniel Craig and Marc Forster had to write portions of the movie.
No joke, every single character in this movie is pissy. Bond mopes. M nags. Mathis drones. Camille complains. Fields hovers. Felix sulks. It's like somebody told all these characters, "You're doing a by-the-numbers sequel, and so help me God you won't be finished doing this sequel until you've said all your lines."
In case you've never seen the movie, Bond spends the runtime killing people in order to enact vengeance upon the shady organization Quantum for stealing away his beloved Vesper. He goes rogue to do this, sort of. Basically, the entire narrative undercuts Bond's beautiful character arc in Casino Royale until it decides to stop undercutting it, at which point Bond ends up where he ended up at the end of the first movie. There's also a dull villain plot about resource monopolies, woo-hoo.
It's possible that a talented director could have siphoned diamonds from this narrative rubble, but alas, Marc Forster is not that director. His career blossomed in a promising way with Finding Neverland and Stranger than Fiction, but it has since become apparent that Forster is only as good as the material he's given. His recent World War Z adaptation stands testament to that.
Forster and co.'s second deep tissue conceptual mistake is the film's treatment of action. Clearly siphoning from the popularity of 2007's The Bourne Ultimatum, Forster adopts a hectic quick-cut shaky cam style for his action sequences. Gone are the crisp, stylish, exhilarating setpieces from Casino Royale, to be replaced with, "Ohhhh man what's happening! Damn, what's happening! What's going on! What's... seriously though... who is where in this room and what are they shooting at?" I enjoyed the impressionistic opening car chase. The quick cuts feel brutal and gritty, as they are meant to. But that enjoyment is quickly quelled when I realized that technique wasn't meant to disorient us during this one opening scene... it is how every moment of combat will be filmed. It's frustrating, and it's antithetical to all the core principles of what makes good action.
Whereas Casino's Bond displays his ingenuity and tenacity via his action scenes, Quantum's Bond is apparently just really good at manipulating machinery. This is symptomatic of a greater disease: Casino strove to make Bond meaningful, but Quantum is just trying to make Bond cool.* Why is Bond seeking vengeance? Because it's cool. Why is Bond aloof and unrelatable? Because it's cool. Why is this movie called Quantum of Solace? Because it's... cool?
*Movies generally deserve to stand alone rather than be compared to their peers at every step, but to be honest Quantum asked for it.
Which brings me back around to the action sequences. As I said, the rapid fire shaky cam style of the Bourne trilogy was lifted wholesale without any regard to why the style worked well for that particular series. It's a textbook example of style before substance. I can only imagine they were trying to respond to idiot complaints that there wasn't enough action in Casino Royale, so now we get a new action sequence every scene and a half, and it all washes over us like so much chaff. Nothing even remotely resembles the craft of the two action scenes I discussed in my Casino review. Nothing resembles anything. The editing feels like it was done by an incredibly bored jackrabbit.
So we come to the final and perhaps most entertaining issue I take with Quantum of Solace. The editing is atrocious. I'm not just talking about the incoherent action. All throughout the movie the editing off-kilter, off-putting, and occasionally flat out perplexing. Images are inserted willy nilly, images that feel out of place or out of taste. One sequence of four shots baffled me so much that I had to rewatch it to make sure I wasn't missing something. Then I grabbed a friend to watch the sequence again with me, and after some deliberation we pinpointed the issue. Based on the context of the scene and the blocking of the characters, we figured out what the ending of the scene must have been trying to say, but the editor had inserted the wrong shot in the wrong place, such that it rooted the scene in an unimportant character's perspective and jumbled the audience takeaway into nonsense. I apologize for the vagaries, I tried to find a good clip on youtube but couldn't. If you're curious, I'm talking about the transition between the end of Bond recruiting Mathis and the beginning of the scene on the plane. See if you can figure out which two shots should be flipflopped for the scene to make sense. It seems like a minor mistake, but such small details can completely change the meaning of a scene, and it's an astounding oversight at the professional level. Maybe the editor didn't understand the scene, or didn't care, but at any rate I had a lot of fun picking it apart.
Most of my entertainment during this movie was actually derived from paying attention to the editing. Editing is one of the most difficult cinematic crafts to learn about, because it's easy to notice things like special effects, good dialogue, good acting, or even good lighting, but functional editing is meant to be invisible. That's why you need a real turkey to learn about editing; you can see the craft falling apart at the seams. Quantum of Solace actually has two credited editors. One, Matt Chesse, is a Marc Forster regular who has tagged along for most of his filmography. The other, Richard Pearson, has a career that is topped by--surprise surprise--The Bourne Supremacy. Otherwise he's cut and pasted such films as Muppets from Space, Scary Movie 2, Iron Man 2, Red Dawn, and Dracula Untold. Ouch.
There, I managed to survive a Quantum of Solace viewing and reviewing thanks to a lengthy detour into editing technique. This has been a cautionary tale about learning the right things from your success.
To be honest, the movie gets a bad rap, but it's not awful. If anything it commits the sin of mediocrity. Though that may be the greatest sin of all.
2 / 5 BLOBS
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