James Bond meet Jason Bourne. Jason Bourne, this is James Bond. I heard this comparison all week before finally seeing the film today and it is a decent analogy. This flick has a lot more action than you would expect from a typical Bond film, but they tend to have a good amount of action in them. Ebert gives the opinion in his review (several times) that Bond is not an action hero. Well…….yes and no……
The story picks up just a few minutes after the end of the previous installment, “Casino Royale,” beginning with a high-speed chase and the interrogation of Mr. White. Seeking revenge for the death of Vesper, Bond (Daniel Craig) goes globetrotting after some leads lead him to Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), the head of a secret world-wide organization that wants to control the world’s most precious resource. Along the way, he meets Camille (Olga Kurylenko), who is on a revenge mission of her own. Together, Bond and Camille must fight against Greene and his mysterious organization, Quantum, before they take control of the world’s water supplies, while at the same time, settling their vendettas to receive a “Quantum of Solace.”
This is the first time in Bond history that an installment in the series is a direct sequel to the previous one. Knowing the betrayal and heartache Bond suffers at the end of “Casino Royale,” we know exactly why he goes on his revenge quest. At the same time, the series continues with its excellent re-imagining of Bond as an everyday human with emotions. So while it was typical to not have tons of action in the previous installments, for this entry, the action works in the sense that Bond is going to do everything he can to take revenge on those who were responsible for Vesper’s death. That is why, no, Bond is not typically an action hero, but for this film’s purposes, yes, he is.
While the story worked for the most part, I wish they had taken the time to develop it a bit more. Aside from being the first sequel in the series, it is also the shortest film in the entire series, running only about 101 minutes. The brevity of the film made it feel like it was rushed through production, concentrating on the amazing action sequences, without getting a really firm story in place. But I realize that the story with Dominic Greene is not really the centerpiece of the story; Bond’s revenge is, though I still wish that they had come up with something a little more exciting and inventive than eco-terrorists as the backdrop.
The action scenes were truly amazing in this movie. As the film starts, we are immediately thrown into a high-speed car chase and later in the film, we are also treated to a foot chase, a plane chase, and some decent hand-to-hand combat. The problem I had with some of these actions sequences was how sloppily they were edited. The average duration of shots during some of these scenes must have been about .5 seconds. This made some of the action really disorienting and hard to follow. I hadn’t seen such sloppy editing since “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”
The editors, Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson, are relatively new to the field, having only started film editing in 2000 and 1998 respectively. Pearson had worked on “The Bourne Supremacy” before (which I felt was the weakest of the Bourne movies), but no other action films besides that, while Chesse had no action experience whatsoever. I don’t see why the producers of the Bond series suddenly decided to go with a new director (Marc Forster) with no action experience and two editors with little to no action experience. Despite Forster’s lack of experience, he somehow managed to pull together a decent Bond outing, though I would have preferred that they stuck with Martin Campbell, director of “Casino Royale” and “Goldeneye,” which are personally my two favorite Bond films.
Of course, with a Bond film, comes a new Bond theme which I must say a few words on. I was incredibly impressed by the theme to “Casino Royale,” which was “You Know My Name” by Chris Cornell. In fact, it is now my favorite Bond theme of all time. So I was expecting another amazing theme from this new set of Bond films, but what we got was less than I had expected. Not to say that it’s terrible, but just that I think they could have done better. The theme for this film is “Another Way To Die” performed by Jack White of the White Stripes and Alicia Keys which has a catchy instrumental part, but just didn’t really click with me as being good enough to be a Bond theme.
There will be those that will continue to compare this movie to the Bourne series saying that this is not what Bond should be. While there are others, like me, who will see this as Bond finishing up business from the last film and therefore be able to appreciate it on that level with its many action sequences. But, truly, what more can you ask from a Bond movie, other than for it to be highly entertaining while Bond takes down the bad guy?
3/4 stars.