Quantum of Solace attracted a muted reception from fans and critics upon its release in 2008, one that has remained with it over time. Two years after Daniel Craig was widely acclaimed for Casino Royale’s revival of a franchise that had lost its way during the Pierce Brosnan era, its follow-up was criticized for being abrupt and difficult to follow. The story of the film’s rushed production has already been well-documented. For the uninitiated, it took place amid a Writers’ Guild of America strike, with various members of the crew, including Daniel Craig himself, having to rewrite scenes as they were being filmed. This was possibly what led to Quantum of Solace having the shortest ever running time for a James Bond film, as well as what many viewers characterized as plot holes. However, watched back-to-back with the then-longest ever Bond film, the 145-minute Casino Royale, there is an appreciable leanness to Quantum of Solace’s storytelling that that of its more undisciplined predecessor does not have. Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson edit the action sequences rapidly, which can lead to them having a disorientating effect, but ultimately that just makes them feel more dangerous.
From the film’s outset, Daniel Craig builds upon the strong performance he gave in Casino Royale as a depressed, haunted, world-weary secret agent. He brings both a certain viciousness and a certain humanity to the role of James Bond that no previous actor was able to bring to it. Both qualities are on display in the scene in which his French ally, retired MI6 agent René Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini), lies dying following his shooting by two corrupt police officers. Bond cradles him tenderly and does his best to comfort him, but when he dies, he tosses his body in a nearby dumpster and then steals money from his wallet in order to pay his train fare out to the desert. Rarely do viewers get a chance to see Bond’s tenderness and his brutality juxtaposed so directly, and Craig performs the two contradictory actions in the scene equally convincingly. Bond remains haunted by the death of his girlfriend, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), at the climax of Casino Royale. There is a real sadness in his eyes that is noticed and commented upon by other characters. He does not want to talk about it, the brutal side of his character compelling him to struggle on in silence, but he is clearly hurting inside and remains so at the film’s end, her death having been avenged. Vengeance has given him feelings of resolution and closure, but he is haunted by Lynd’s death and will likely remain so indefinitely.
Another underrated quality to Quantum of Solace is the array of strong supporting performances it boasts. Jeffrey Wright builds upon his strong work in Casino Royale to stake his claim as the best Felix Leiter ever. This Leiter is not a playboy in the style of a John Terry or a David Hedison; more than ever before, he looks and acts like an actual CIA agent. He is ably assisted by a pre-“Stranger Things” David Harbour as Leiter’s amoral section chief, Gregg Beam. Following on from a few supporting roles in films released over the preceding months, this was the film that announced Gemma Arterton as a major screen presence, in her role as by-the-book but charismatic consular desk officer Strawberry Fields. Praise must also go to Olga Kurylenko as leading lady Camille Montes, possibly the first “Bond girl” who Bond views primarily as a professional equal and ally rather than as a potential sexual conquest (she is certainly the first female lead in a Bond film with whom Bond does not have sex). However, Quantum of Solace’s key supporting performance comes from Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene, the duplicitous head of a so-called “clean energy” conglomerate controlled by the titular Quantum organization that killed Lynd. Interestingly, Amalric said the two real-life figures upon whom his performance as the slimy, double-dealing Greene was primarily modeled were former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and then French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The storyline involving Greene’s business activities is what gives Quantum of Solace its most compelling facet: its frequent incorporation of real-life geopolitical events into its fictional narrative. Early on, expositional dialogue reveals Greene to have orchestrated the ouster of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by military dictator General Raoul Cédras in 1991, at the behest of US business interests. Later, Greene invokes the real-life late 1990s/early 2000s trend for countries like Venezuela and Brazil to elect leftist, anti-US regimes. He does this in order to convince Beam to tacitly support a coup d’état against recently elected Bolivian President Evo Morales led by the brutal, implicitly rightist General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio, in a role in which Al Pacino was interested at one point). This will enable Greene’s company to assume control of Bolivia’s oil reserves. Therefore, in an unusual move for the typically jingoistic, pro-Western, anti-communist James Bond franchise, Bond’s personal mission (which deviates somewhat from his professional one) in Quantum of Solace is to stop a villain who is out to depose a Marxist government and keep a left-wing regime in place. Montes also wants to avenge Medrano’s murder of her family when her father was an official in Bolivia’s early 1980s military junta and Medrano was an opposition figure. Progressive Bond fans who occasionally despaired of the franchise’s politics were therefore given a reason to root for Bond in this film that aligned with their real-life opinions – a rarity for this series of films. Indeed, at one point, during a colloquy with Leiter, he openly criticizes CIA activity in South America, telling him sardonically: “I was just wondering what South America would look like if nobody gave a damn about coke or communism. It always impressed me the way you boys would carve this place up.” Montes’ back story also fosters the beginnings of a professional, semi-platonic bond between her and 007; they both want to kill Greene and Medrano as a way of exacting revenge for their respective loved ones’ deaths.
However, despite all the above being said, Quantum of Solace was not well-received upon its release, and the general consensus that it is Daniel Craig’s weakest James Bond film remains. Nathan Kamal’s positive review for this website was something of an outlier in this respect. Whilst several viewers had no problem following the film’s plot, the fact that it crammed so much detail, information, fighting (a 2012 University of Otago study found it to be the most violent Bond film to date on a quantitative basis) and political intrigue into just 106 minutes meant its necessarily breakneck pace left many viewers struggling to keep track of what was happening and why. The political nature of the story was also a possible factor in the lukewarm reception that it received. In real life, banks were collapsing left and right, the global financial system was in freefall and families were losing their homes as a result. Many cinemagoers would therefore likely have been looking for the new James Bond film to function as escapist entertainment, rather than as a thriller with many references to dark events from the very real world of geopolitics. The film also continued the downbeat tone of Casino Royale by giving audiences a James Bond who was a man processing a bereavement. Quantum of Solace is possibly best rewatched now with those factors in mind, rather than with the expectation that it will function as an all-out action adventure in the vein of the disappointing Spectre.
The post Revisit: Quantum of Solace appeared first on Spectrum Culture.