Kelly Wand"Quantum of Soulless" review
November 17th 2008 05:58
All dressed up with double-nowhere to go.
What the hell happened?
Since they’re basically free rides, sequels to successful reboots, a la Dark Knight and Spider-Man 2, are supposed to be the most memorable entries: bigger budgets, less studio interference, seasoned cast, etc. Yet Quantum of Solace is a surprisingly incoherent, perfunctory rush-job, and a huge bummer of a follow-up to 2006’s graceful Casino Royale. How can you make James Bond pissed off, ruthless, and filled with thoughts of vengeance boring? Screenwriter Paul Haggis and director Marc Forster somehow find myriad ways.
Forster slices and dices his way through baffling, incomprehensible, repetitive action sequences like a bombing stand-up comic afraid to stop talking long enough to draw a breath. He shoots everything in rhythmless close-up, leaving you to fill in all that boring spatial relationship stuff for yourself. The editing’s so minced, even the projectionist must feel like he’s sitting in the front row. Note to studio heads: just because it worked with Christopher Nolan and Paul Greengrass, hiring someone who specializes in arty ruminative stuff like Finding Neverland doesn’t qualify him to direct bombastic action sequences.
Since they’re shooting for that literary Ian Fleming vibe, Forster and Haggis open in the middle of a mindless car chase. People we don’t know die, a car with a driver whose face we never see is shown going over a cliff. Supposedly this movie was shot on nineteen different continents, but since everything’s in close-up, they may as well have shot the whole thing in Daniel Craig’s dressing room. The chase’s pay-off: Bond has a guy tied up in his trunk. Oh yeah, Mr. White, that unctuous dick he shot in the leg at the end of Royale. A credit sequence about chicks made out of sand lasts just long enough to remember all this.
Bond brings Mr. White to an underground tunnel for interrogation. Judi Dench’s M. sternly lectures Bond. She thinks he has revenge issues because the guy they’re about to interrogate was responsible for killing Vespa, Bond’s one true love he knew for a few weeks back in the last movie. Forster crosscuts annoyingly between the interrogation and some bullfight going on outside. He's trying to make a profound Eisensteinian point: interrogations are kind of like bullfights.
Prisoner-wise, Mr. White radiates smarts and evil. He’s so smart that when they demand to know who he works for, he tells them his organization has people everywhere and winks at a guy standing behind Bond, outing him as a double agent so the guy can shoot him (instead of Bond, the biggest threat in the room). Bond chases this double agent up and down some scaffoldings and through the bullfight in a long exhaustive sequence closely patterned after the one at the beginning of Casino Royale. Is MI6 retarded, holding this ceremony so close to a big crowded event? Was this the only space available? If M. had time to get there, you’d think they’d have found lodgings at least as secure as Knott’s Berry Farm.
At the last moment and having no choice, Bond manages to shoot the guy before being shot himself, but when he gets back, M. rousts Bond for not capturing him alive so they could interrogate him (their last interrogation having gone so swimmingly). Meantime, Mr. White slipped away in all the carnage, despite being shot twice and tied up, past an apparently uninjured M. and the dozens of other agents and guards that M. neglected to post around the secret tunnel. Maybe they were all double agents too, which doesn’t exactly speak well of M.’s administration. We’ll never see or hear of Mr. White again for the rest of the movie, but luckily we don’t know that yet.
To make the shortest Bond movie ever sound over-plotted, Bond uncovers a fiendish plot by a French Bond-villain type named Dominic Greene to buy up all the land in Bolivia and extort water for high prices from the populace, even though in reality Bolivia’s the poorest nation on the planet and has no water, and its citizens couldn’t scrape two centavos to pay for it if it was raining centavos, which would still be likelier than actual rain. Along the way, Bond hooks up with Bond-girl type Camille, played by Olga Kurylenko, the brain-meltingly hot Ukrainian actress who bared all in Hitman and was inexplicably rejected by Timothy Olyphant. Here she gets to keep her clothes on, wear melted wax on her back, and be rejected by Daniel Craig. (Bond’s idea of foreplay is to hand her unconscious body off to a burly total stranger in Haiti after a boat explosion and say, “She’s seasick.”) As a child, Camille’s character was traumatized by a big fire. This leads to a dramatic climax towards the end where Bond consolingly offers to shoot her in the head during another fire, but upon finally looking around decides to shoot a nearby hydrogen tank and blow up the whole area they’re in. Fortunately the explosion doesn’t affect them and makes a big hole in the thick concrete wall for them to scuttle through as both the flames and Camille’s panic mysteriously, abruptly abate. Characters having the same motivation in two consecutive scenes isn’t really Q of S’s thing.
Being sexually spurned by Bond is probably a blessing, though, since the girl he does sleep with winds up dead in a non sequitur Goldfinger reference, only instead of gold, it’s oil, even though the villains are after water, not oil. Bond also reunites with Gianncarlo Giannini, a friend he screwed over in the first movie, but makes it up to him this time out by using him as a human shield, dumping his corpse in a garbage can, and stealing the forty bucks in his wallet. The guy’s last words to Bond are a generous suggestion for him to stop blaming himself for other people’s deaths.
In between these inconclusive self-help seminars, Bond starts shit with various groups of faceless gunmen, first at an opera performance starring a giant wall with an eyeball painted on it, then at a hotel, a desert, and a facility in a desert powered by “fuel cells”. Forster crosscuts (again) between the gunfight and the opera performance because he’s making a larger point: gunfights are kind of like operas about eyeballs.
The gimmick that’s supposedly adding tension to all this is Bond being “out of control”. He’s so out of control, in fact, that at one point M. revokes all his credit cards and passports and hires a sexy redheaded agent named Strawberry Fields to make him come home, since nubile female agents are, in her view, professionally immune to Bond’s charms (hey, M., why not send a gay dude?). So there’s Bond, stranded without money, transportation, or resources in a foreign city, the object of a huge international manhunt by U.S. and British government agencies. He must be so fired. How does he cope with this crippling financial setback? By flirting with a concierge.
Both M. and Bond’s loyal American CIA buddy Felix Leiter repeatedly set traps to snare Bond, while simultaneously telling him to run away and publicly taking his side. After an unarmed, wounded Bond kills* a dozen CIA captors in an elevator (again, in a gobbledygook mishmash of close-ups and blurred tuxedoes) during one escape and agents ask M. what legal course they should take based on this, she replies gravely, “Nothing. He’s my agent, and I trust him.”
I’m all for psychological grace notes as pay-offs but the movie’s stingy even with those. Most of the closure happens offscreen. At the end when Bond tells M. that the man who (also) killed Vespa is “still alive” upstairs, you assume from his chilly tone a reveal of the man so maimed he wishes he were dead. But it’s unclear what Bond did or said, since Forster cuts away from the whole scene upstairs. Mr. White is never seen again or referred to. Dominic Greene (who like Le Chiffre has no interesting henchmen) dies off-camera from dehydration, although apparently his dead body gets shot a few times by unknown parties too, for unknown reasons. Even the iconic James Bond theme goes unheard till the closing credits.
Casino Royale’s systematic scrapping of time-honored Bond traditions -- double entendres, beautiful girls who can't fight, lasers, gadgetry, volcanic HQs, and vaguely Asian guys with claws for hands or teeth -- represented a corporate effort to “modernize” Bond, i.e. ape the Bourne movies, especially those rooftop chases. But the rebooters forgot the point of all that stuff: it was fun.
Bond movies should shake. This one barely stirs.
*We’re supposed to assume they’re all unconscious but that seems too far-fetched even for a Bond movie.
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Comment by Cibbuano
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
Comment by Kelly Wand
Sprocket Holed
I blame Blair Witch.
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
I'm still gonna see it though.
I think I need to watch Hitman now.
Marc Forster did a great job with Monster's Ball. Sounds like he should stick with small dramas.
Bring back Martin Campbell I say.