I have to say sorry in advance because I borrowed the title of this post from a segment on rottentomatoes.com. I usually come up with some worthy title, not good but adequate, but I guess the excessive heat in Jakarta kinda messed up my creativity.
James Bond is a character that people identified as the perfect secret agent. He’s handsome, slick, suave, and gets a lot of action. However, for some reason I never liked that character. Pierce Brosnan is the James Bond I grew up watching. His Bond was, in my opinion, too handsome and too clean to be viewed as the tough secret agent. Suffice to say, I never liked the character when he’s playing it, despite all the fuzz that said he’s the best Bond since Connery. GoldenEye was good, but god knows how much I hate World is not Enough, Tomorrow Never Dies, and especially, Die Another Day. All of them were ridiculously campy, over the top and had ludicrous plots. Furthermore, during my early teens there were a lot of Roger Moore’s Bond reruns on my local TV. Roger Moore’s Bond was even worse than Brosnan’s. I don’t know if that’s because of his acting, or just because he was just doing the film in the wrong decade. Sean Connery was probably the best of the lot.
And then came Casino Royale. This is the movie that caught me off guard. I didn’t expect the so-called reboot was going to be that good. Daniel Craig is, hands-down, the kind of Bond that really reflect a tough secret agent. He ain’t pretty, but he knows what he’s doing and he gets the job done with only few things that he’s got (no invisible car, or the ridiculous jetpack). This is the James Bond that Ian Fleming wrote in his stories. Casino Royale serves as a good background story of the first years of Bond’s career as a 00 agent. I liked how they changed the far-fetched toys with gritty realism.
Quantum of Solace is a direct sequel of Casino Royale. It picks up right where Royale ends. While Casino Royale gave a lot of insight of Bond’s character, Quantum of Solace is more of a straight forward action movie. The first action scene with the car in Italy is great. Marc Forster handled this scene surprisingly well. However the rest of the action scenes were caught up in what I called “Bourne style”. Forster uses too much shaky cam and edited it with quick cuts that aren’t friendly for the eyes. The plot continued with Bond following the lead that Vesper left in the last movie. His investigations led to an organization called Quantum. This is an organization that controls many countries with its vast resources. In this movie, one of Quantum’s members named Dominic Greene planned to support the new coup d’etat of Bolivian government to seize control of the country’s water supply. Seem overly simple for a Bond movie? Probably yes. But this makes sense because Quantum is seeking to control territory over countries all over the world, so what’s better than to control one of the most important assets of the country? This way the government will have to bow down to the organization. Great way to bring the world down on your knees, I say.
This movie would be a waste without Daniel Craig. Not only he managed to put on a great performance in this movie, he carries the movie. While the previous Bonds seemed to overcome their mission rather easily, Craig’s Bond was just barely in the game at all. He’s got to get his hands dirty, he bleeds, and he doesn’t mind getting scars here and there in the process. If in the first movie we saw him dealing with his ego, in this movie we see he developed his attitude to be a great 00 agent and moved on from the death of his lover. This is the biggest difference from Craig’s Bond from the other Bond. We can see that there’s a character development in each movie. The Bond at the early of Casino Royale is different from the Bond in at the end of Quantum of Solace, and I mean it in a good way. The last moment of the movie when he drops Vesper’s necklace is the defining moment, signing that he has moved on from the loss his lover.
Now, to the bad part. I’ve mentioned the action parts earlier. I was slightly disappointed by it, but the most disappointing thing is the duration of the movie which is too short. The previous movie has the duration of 2 hour something. That would give sufficient time to dig in deep into the characters. This movie just gave a little over 90 minutes of duration. Not enough time to give development of character. Furthermore most of the duration is filled with non-stop action. As a result the storyline felt a bit rushed to fit in the duration. The presence of Eva Green as Vesper Lynd is sorely missed here. I feel that Vesper’s role in Casino Royale is very important. Not only she’s beautiful, but she’s got the personality that can match that of Bond’s. The main Bond girl (which Bond didn’t sleep or even make out with) is uninteresting. I’m talking not about her looks, but more about her character. This Bond girl is too dark to be a Bond girl, or at least in my opinion. She lacks the personality and chemistry that Vesper Lynd gave in Casino Royale, and ultimately, she's too concern about her own personal vendetta and only provides few charms for the audience.
Given its weaknesses, Quantum of Solace is still a worthy addition to the Bond franchise. I managed to forgive the past Bonds for their portrayal because all of them would be squished by Daniel Craig’s Bond. I really hoped that they would keep this Bond for a long time, because this is the exact James Bond we need for the 21st century.
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