Quantum of Solace, directed by Marc Forster
Karen Ballard; ©Danjaq/United Artists/Columbia
I don't often get to preview films, but last night did manage to get myself invited to a pre-release showing of the new Bond film - not a posh event by any manner of means, but it did involve a free glass of wine. And the need to hand in your mobile phone in advance, for fear that you'll record the whole film and upload it onto YouTube so that no one goes to the cinema at all to see the movie, and the studios make no profits whatever from it. It's a bit far-fetched; but then, we are talking about Bond.
Well, if you like action, you may love Quantum of Solace. The action is fabulous: there are explosions all over the place, bone-crunching collisions, massive-impact car chases, jumps off roofs that make you wince, and generally a high-octane atmosphere of rush and smash. The smart thing to say about Bond these days is that it's heavily influenced by the Jason Bourne series of films, in which Matt Damon’s trained killer escapes from his programming and is chased and buffeted quite hard all over the globe by the CIA machine that would do for him, if it could. It’s smart, and it’s true, and the signs of Bourne are all over Bond. In fact, Quantum of Solace is embarrassingly like Bourne, even down to Bond going off on his own and being chased by American special forces. But Bond can never quite be as cynical and as dirty as Bourne – and I’m afraid it’s not as good.
Because apart from the action, there really is nothing. The plot, such as it is, is unsatisfactory: you're left to wonder exactly what the villainous Quantum organisation has to do with the death of Vesper Lind and the revenge motive that we're told is driving Bond. Not only that - you also wonder why exactly Quantum, which is involved in a pretty simple scheme to make money from dictatorship and water in Bolivia, is of interest to British intelligence. Actually the scheme doesn't even make sense it its own terms, unless you think Bolivian courts are beyond the control of newly-installed dictators. No plot, then, and no geopolitics, either, because from this film you'd never suspect there was a new cold war, that Al Qaeda still operates, that China is on the rise or that nuclear proliferation is a present danger. Nor is there a great deal of character. Yes, Camille (or "Kammy", as you think she's called until you see her name in the end credits) wants to avenge her father's death, though even she's not sure why, but there's little charge between her and Bond. Mathieu Amalric, who I last saw in Heartbeat Detector, looks so sinister he was born to be a Bond villain, and is pretty villainous, but even he doesn't provide enough of a spark of evil, really, to heat up this movie. It's a shame he won't survive to be given a stronger role in a future film. A good index of how poorly the script works is that the writers feel a need to insert a senseless rape scene so that we realise how bad the nasty general is before Camille gets to take him on. What happens to the victim of the rape, we never know: she's served her purpose by the time the explosions begin, and we're not invited to care what happens to her.
An interesting contrast is with the BBC's spy series Spooks, which is just beginning its seventh series. It's not easy to take Spooks seriously but at least it goes full-bloodedly over the top, and I quite like its mix of techno-spying, cynicism and smart dialogue (one character talked in episode one of the new series about the Russians wanting to give her "a polonium suppository"). Astonishingly, too, it has women in it who aren’t just eye candy - as though this were the 21st century! Spooks is free and has the plot, character and geopolitics that are completely missing from Bond. Better sex, too. It's much the better choice.
Mark Kermode agrees with me about Quantum of Solace, I'm glad to say. I'm not sure how anyone can disagree, although James Christopher manages to. Peter Bradshaw is much sounder.
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