Shaken, Not Stirred

All you really need to know about Quantum of Solace can be summed up in three words: slam, bang, and crash. They describe the action scenes, of course, but also the story, the camera work, and even Bond himself. There's not much rhyme or reason to the movie, the 22nd film in the James Bond franchise, and the sequel to the 2006 series reboot, Casino Royale, and not a smidgen of poetry, but it bashes its way through its hour and forty or so minutes with enough oomph to be mostly worth a go.

Solace may be graceless, but it's got energy. It slams from the start, opening with a crowd of expensive cars noisily careening around a series of treacherous mountain curves, and it doesn't let up from there, going on to bang around for a bit in Italy, Haiti, and Australia, among other places, before finally crashing to an end in a secret desert complex in Bolivia. Slam! Bang! Crash! Don't worry, mayhem-junkies. You'll get your fill of all three.

But don't bother trying to understand what happens in between. The film picks up right after Casino Royale, with Bond on the hunt for the secret organization that turned his beloved Vesper against him. While on his vendetta, he meets a similarly driven revenge-seeker, the lovely Camille (Olga Kurylenko). They make their way toward their targets, crossing paths with generically evil Domic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who fronts a formidable Eurotrash sneer, U.S. spook Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), a creepy henchman with a Vulcan haircut, and a host of lesser foils. Much of the film consists of the pair hopping from country to country while running afoul of the CIA, a powerful criminal organization using an environmental organization as a front, and a dastardly dictator. The globe-trotting doesn't have much glamour to it, but at least it's easy to follow. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the story, a muddled, misshapen mess that seems constructed mostly to move Bond and Camille through a series of violent confrontations.

Those confrontations, though, are a big part of what makes the movie worth watching. They're bloodier than usual for Bond, but they rattle the bones brilliantly. Director Marc Forster doesn't have nearly the feel for action geography or motion that helped make Casino Royale's action setpieces so giddy and grand, but what he lacks in spacial sense, he makes up for in sheer frenzy and volume. The camera work is dizzying, and often disorienting, but the sound effects make every gun shot crackle, every pane of broken glass shriek. At its best, Solace delivers good old fashioned chaos -- frenetic, ferocious, and just plain loud.

Bond may cause a lot of noise and destruction, but, as played by Daniel Craig, he's controlled and quiet. Problem is, he's not much else. Casino Royale managed to both shake up the character and stay true to it by showing Bond before he was Bond. It was a story about becoming. Solace wastes all that background; this film's Bond is a bad boy and a bruiser, but he's not, well... Bond. Instead, he's just another slick, ruthless, big-screen revenge-a-tron: emotionless, robotic, deadly and, one hates to say it, just a little bit dull.

Part of that, no doubt, was intentional. Quantum takes pains to distance the character from the tropes that defined previous incarnations: there's no "shaken, not stirred" uttered in the film, and he doesn't sleep with his leading lady. But after stripping away the tics that defined the character, screenwriters Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade didn't bother to replace them with anything else. By doing so, they've reduced Bond to a perfunctory tough guy. That makes it easy enough to watch him kill, but somewhat harder to care.

Bond's allure has always been based in large part on his sense of style. The Brosnan-era films may have taken that to ridiculous extremes -- I'll be as happy as anyone never to see Bond dashingly adjust his tie knot underwater again -- but Solace seems to have gone too far in the other direction. Maybe that's the point, to take away Bond's flair, to make him utterly ordinary. But if so, I'm disappointed. Solace is a solid, if unremarkable, big-budget action picture. But Bond, at least one hopes, should be something more. In Casino Royale, M dismisses Bond as a "blunt instrument." Solace is much the same: It does the job, but it's not pretty.

Peter Suderman is Culture11's arts editor.