Quantum of Solace - Dir. Marc Forster (The Bond Project #22 - JK)

Quantum of Solace (2008) 

Dir. Marc Forster

                

Inscrutable Bond

by 

Jack Knorps

                Quantum of Solace epitomizes the reason why I have not been keeping up on the Bond films that have come out during my lifetime (eschewing the Dalton Bonds as I was six at the time of the last one, there have been six, and I would say I have seen 3 (GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies each counting for ½ as I watched them as “background noise”)): it is too difficult to follow.

                Of course, this is a sequel to Casino Royale, and picks up where that film left off, and begins with a fantastic chase sequence, again, which may or may not be similar to the one in Licence to Kill and/or The Dark Knight Rises.  Regardless, the stunt work is not a problem for the film (nor do I think it has ever been an area where the Franchise has suffered).  

                I do want to pause for a moment to question why the Bond films must not be Rated R.  Clearly, the subject-matter is R-rated.  There is an extraordinary amount of violence in the films, as well as sexual tomfoolery.  But, Bond does not curse.  The lack of the F-word keeps them PG-13.  So kids can see it, and here’s a prediction: Skyfall will kill during its opening weekend.

                But do kids really understand what is going on in this movie, or do they just like big explosions and cool stunts?  That’s my problem.  Even if you take out the “adult” subject matter, the Bond films are meant to be seen and understood by adults that can appreciate the political commentary they offer, as their plots always revolve around foreign affairs.  Given that Bond is an English agent, it is even more difficult for Americans to understand the purposes of his missions.

                While watching this film, I reflected upon watching films with my older sister.  My older sister often asks a multitude of questions during films with only slightly complicated plots.  If she were to agree to watch Quantum of Solace, I do not think she would make it through 30 minutes.  And she would miss 77 minutes and probably be no worse in her Bond knowledge.

                It is significant that Casino Royale runs an epic 144 minutes and this film clocks in at a “suitable” 107.  Maybe I just like long movies, but for some reason Quantum of Solace feels like it is missing something.  My guess is that this is attributable to the unique quality of the Craig Bonds: Skyfall is apparently the last film of a trilogy.  Perhaps the closure that always seems to be lurking in Quantum of Solace, holding over from Casino Royale, will finally be delivered in Bond #23.

                The villain in this film, Dominic Greene, seeks to acquire a desert in Bolivia from a Bolivian Dictator.  The Dictator tells him that he is wasting his time—many people have tried to find oil there in the past to no avail.  Greene does not seem to care.  He offers his services—which, if I recall correctly, involve paying off government officials so that the Dictator may continue his reign—in exchange for ownership of this desert land.  The agreement is made, and Greene is happy-go-lucky.  He is also, apparently, a philanthropist, who is a strong advocate of environmental protection and sustainable energy.  This may or may not have to do with “Quantum.”  Later he claims that the world’s most valuable resource is held in this desert.  Perhaps that resource is Quantum.  I cannot tell.  Later, in a scene that law students may appreciate, he coerces the dictator into signing a contract with his company, which owns 60% of the clean water supply of Bolivia.

                Now, Greene is played by an extremely capable actor.  At first, I recognized him as a French actor, but I could not place him.  Looking him up on IMDB, I found that he is probably most familiar to American audiences due to his stellar performance in, incredibly, another film reviewed on Flying Houses.  The actor is Mathieu Amalric, and if The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is any indication of his talents, then I can only conclude that he was not given a very good role by the screenwriters.  True, he is an interesting villain, because generally we do not think of environmental advocates as villains.  (Perhaps this is some kind of political statement too, but that would go too far).  The problem is that he is not believable as a violent person.  He makes threats, but he does not carry them out.  I don’t even remember if he dies in the movie or not. 

                On that note, Paul Haggis wrote the screenplay along with Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.  Now I will not comment on the latter two, but I am sure they are capable.  And I will not blame Haggis totally, because Casino Royale is really quite an excellent film, but Haggis is most famous for writing and directing a certain Oscar winning film that jacked its vague title from a David Cronenberg vehicle.  Many people decried Crash for capitalizing on “hidden racist sentiment” that may or may not still be a factor in present-day Los Angeles, but Haggis won again next year with his screenplay for Million Dollar Baby, a film that was much more appreciated—particularly for its “twist.”

                Furthermore, Marc Forster directed this film.  Now, Marc Forster has a pretty good track record.  I never saw Finding Neverland but it was apparently quite good, I found Monster’s Ball to be quite compelling, and while Stay was basically a “non-starter,” now that Ryan Gosling is an A-lister, more people might have seen this film by now, and they should because it’s quite interesting.  This is to say nothing of The Kite Runner or Stranger Than Fiction (only the latter of which I’ve seen, and which is light entertainment, but not offensive).  I just have to admit that Forster does not seem to be the best director for this film.  Nor was it the best script. 

                Craig himself is good, and still icy—if not icier.  The Bond Girl, played by Olga Kurylenko, is quite beautiful, and vows revenge against the Bolivian Dictator for crimes he committed against her family in her childhood.  She is more than adequate in her role, and one of the better parts of the movie—but unfortunately if you compare her performance to Eva Green’s in Casino Royale, you will see how much better that film was than this one.  Judi Dench is also good as M, though I was quite confused when she apparently got shot and then showed up in the next scene looking very healthy without any kind of explanation—perhaps there was a pithy line thrown out that I missed. 

                I believe I have said all I can about Quantum of Solace.  It’s not a terrible movie, but it’s not a terribly exciting movie either.  It is rather confounding, but I suppose if we are to view these Craig Bonds as a Trilogy that it is necessary to view so you will not be lost when you see Skyfall.  Perhaps the best thing about Quantum of Solace is its theme song sung by Jack White, which is consistent with Bond playing to the trends of the times.  If I have to attach a “rating” to my two reviews here, I would give Casino Royale 3 ½ stars, and Quantum of Solace  2 ½ stars (I would only give it 2, but the ½ comes from the theme song as well as the potential for intrigue for Skyfall—that is, the hope that they have saved their best for the last).

Casino Royale - Dir. Martin Campbell (The Bond Project #21 - JK)

Casino Royale (2006)

Dir: Martin Campbell

Icy Bond
by
Jack Knorps

                I should begin this review by noting that my knowledge of the James Bond Canon is very slight.  It is only due to THE BOND PROJECT, suggested and carried out by Jay Maronde, that I have been able to learn about the history of the Franchise.  I had seen portions of GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies in my early high school years, but had never seen one of the films in its entirety until Casino Royale.  Thus I am able to judge this film completely on its own terms.  And  I would say it is a very good one. 

The film opens in Prague, jumps to Uganda, then Madagascar, then London, then Paradise Island in the Bahamas, then Miami, then Montenegro, and finally to Venice.  There may be other Bond films with more “globe-trotting,” but this one also makes wonderful use of an extraordinary array of beautiful shooting locations—particularly the scenes in Venice, and the final scene of the film (perhaps a “hidden” location).

                The film opens up with a relatively quiet pre-credits sequence involving an assassination carried out by Bond which only hints at the plot of the film.  The scene in Uganda fleshes that plot out, where we see a strange man, dapper, with a glass eye, approach a terrorist group to assist them with their funding.  They give him a large amount of cash in briefcases and request that he invest it in a portfolio with no risk.  He leaves, and he calls someone on his cell phone and says, “Buy one hundred million dollars worth of stock in Skyfleet.”  The man on the other end says, “Why?  Everyone knows that stock is only going to go up.”  As a student taking a course in Corporate Finance, this part was quite interesting to me.

                The next scene shows Bond in Madagascar, and this is one of the best chase scenes I have seen in recent memory.  He is hunting down a bomb-maker for a terrorist organization in an attempt to get information about who is helping to fund his and other organizations.  This bomb-maker is quite an acrobat, and it is quite humorous to watch Bond—admittedly in very good shape, but no acrobat—try to catch up to him.  Perhaps the key moment is when he jumps to an elevator, and slams the lever down so that he drops to the bottom at near free-fall speed.  This “motif” will arise in the penultimate scene in the film to nearly-heartbreaking effect.

                A word on Daniel Craig as Bond: he is icy.  He plays a cold, ruthless killer, who has no sympathy for his victims (or at least so he later says when questioned on the matter—“I wouldn’t be good at my job otherwise,” he explains).  He has the ability to turn on the charm when necessary to do so, but he rarely allows his emotions to get in the way.  This does happen in the film near the end, but in such a manner that one could not call it “false.”  He is a good Bond, perhaps lacking the suave of Pierce Brosnan, but adding a hard-nosed “darkness” to the character that is quite appropriate for this era of film where morally ambiguous characters tend to fill the screen and most filmmakers want to achieve the kind of success that Christopher Nolan has turned into a trend.

                In London, M (played to perfection, again, by Dame Judi Dench) chastises Bond for allowing the bomb-maker to die in a melee and tells him never to “go rogue” again.  Bond has actually broken into her home while this conversation takes place.  He then goes to the Bahamas—not for a vacation, but to track a cell phone call that he found in connection with the bomb-maker. 

                The first time we see Bond driving a car, he is driving a Ford rental car to the hotel on Paradise Island (The Ocean Club, which may or may not be a stand-in for the famous luxury resort Atlantis—which is shown in at least one shot).  The subtle humor of this scene is escalated when Bond waits for his valet to return to park the car.  Bond kneels down to tie one of his shoes, and another hotel patron arrives in a Range Rover.  He throws his keys at Bond and tells him to hurry up and park the car.  Bond drives the Range Rover rather aggressively, parks it carefully, then slams it into reverse as if he is going to park perfectly in another spot behind him—but does not slam on the brakes and instead smashes into a car in the next spot behind him.  Many alarms go off, and Bond throws the keys to the Range Rover aimlessly across the parking lot.  The lesson is that you do not mistake James Bond for a parking valet or he will ruin your car.

                The cell phone information leads him to check out a surveillance camera tape from the date and time of the call, wherein he is able to view the caller: another bomb-maker.  This one has a beautiful wife/girlfriend/mistress that Bond sees as he comes out of the ocean from a swim at the beach.  She is attending to a horse.  He eyes her, and she notices.  Later, Bond seduces her in his hotel room in order to get information about the bomb-maker.  This scene is quite suggestive and may show that audiences in 2006 are not as “prudish” for PG-13 purposes as in the past.  This film could get an R-rating, but excessive cursing is not necessary in a Bond film, and the sex scenes are edited just to the point that nudity does not occur while still remaining quite intense.  It appears as if he may spend the night with her, but instead he leaves and goes directly for the bomb-maker—who has gone to the Miami airport. 

                There is apparently a new prototype of a plane being unveiled: Skyfleet’s biggest airplane ever.  The bomb-maker is on the scene to destroy the plane, in the hopes of sending the company into bankruptcy and the stock down to almost nothing.  I do not understand the economics of this plan, and I may be incorrect either about the motives of the bomb-makers and the financier of the terrorist organization or principles of Corporate Finance—but it would appear that they would want the stock to go up!  I am probably missing some subtle plot point here but I confess I watched this film on my laptop and that sometimes it can be difficult to catch everything that a character says in this film.  You really need to pay close attention. 

                The financier is Le Chiffre, who may or may not be French, but is quite a good poker player, known for his famous bluffing which sometimes involves crying tears of blood from his glass eye.  I will not reveal what happens during the scene in the airport, but the Skyfleet plane model itself is fantastic, and the scene itself is probably the second “great” one in the film.

                From there Bond returns to London and is informed that Le Chiffre (who has by now been connected to the bomb-maker in question at the Miami airport) will be playing at a $150 million poker game in Montenegro—will Bond play?  Of course he will.

                On the train he meets the beautiful Vesper Lynd, whom he calls “Miss Money.”  Initially it made me think that this was his token scene of flirting with Miss Moneypenny, and that Miss Moneypenny had stopped working for MI6 and had started working for the British Treasury department, which is funding Bond’s $10 million buy-in for the game.  But like I said, I have not seen any of the Bond films in their entirety.  For this farce in Montenegro, she will play his wife, and they will share a two-bedroom suite.  He buys her a dress to wear, and she buys him a dinner jacket to wear.  They go to the game, and it is adjourned twice.  Violence ensues during the first adjournment, and Le Chiffre is targeted by the terrorist organization demanding their money.  They threaten to cut off his girlfriend’s hand, but he does not seem to care. 

                Shortly after the second adjournment, something happens to Bond that I will not reveal, but which sets up the third “great” scene—which is the final long stretch of the poker game.  After that Bond is captured, subjected to an act of torture that is both frightening and hilarious (in terms of Bond’s reactions, at least), and saved by a mysterious figure in an almost random act of violence.

                From there he escapes with Vesper Lynd to a tropical location and they live happily ever after.

                Obviously that last sentence is not true but this is a film that seems rather easy to spoil.  I will just say that the final hour of the film is probably its strongest part—and that means no disrespect to the opening and middle sections of the film, which are quite well done.  I just enjoyed the ending because everything seems to fall apart rather quickly and become extremely dramatic in a way that catches the viewer off guard.  And the final scene (and more precisely, the final shot) of the film is instantly classic.  Perhaps there is a Bond film with a better closing line, or cliffhanger, but it would be hard to imagine.

                The writer for THE BOND PROJECT, Jay Maronde, informed me that Quantum of Solace picks up where Casino Royale left off, and in this way, the two films are the only Bond films that might be considered “two parts of one very long film.”  Jay has also intimated that he finds these two films to be amongst the very best of the Franchise.  While this initially shocked me, with so many classics in the past, after watching Casino Royale I can certainly understand why, and am very excited to see what happens next.   

Tomorrow Never Dies - Dir. Roger Spottiswoode (The Bond Project #18)

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

Dir: Roger Spottiswoode

You Only Live Twice : Part Deux
by
Jay Maronde

                So let me be completely honest: I was going to pan this movie. I’ve been planning on panning this movie the entire time. I’ve been super excited about panning this movie and I even thought up this great article title which I’m sticking with even though I’m not planning on completely panning this movie anymore.  This film is easily the weakest of the Brosnan Bonds and was also the lowest performing at the box office. It also bears a striking resemblance in plot to You Only Live Twice, which of course is one more thing to slam on this movie about—but having watched it more than a few times now, I think there are definitely some redeeming factors and I still think that this film is worth at least a cursory viewing and in the very least I can assure you that it will be a highly amusing divergence on a rainy day.

                This film is completely saved from its “re-used” plot and deplorable casting by one thing: great fucking action sequences. This film’s pre-credit sequence could be one of my favorites in the Canon, as Bond is doing extremely James Bond things. He’s surveying a terrorist swap meet. The Admiral in the war room won’t listen to M or Bond, and orders the whole swap meet to be destroyed with a ballistic missile shot from a boat a long ways away. It’s only after this point of no return that Bond is finally able to convince them that the MIG in the distance is laden with nukes and this is going to be a catastrophe. With no other options but to save the world Bond leaps into action, assaults hundreds of terrorists by himself, steals the plane, and flies off with the nukes just seconds before the whole area is destroyed by the Admiral’s missile. Even after saving the world from a mess worse than Chernobyl, Bond still has to deal with a hostile who has returned to consciousness in the rear seat of the cockpit of the plane he is flying and another hostile pilot in another MIG. Bond dispenses with both of them in classic Bond fashion by ejector seat blasting his backseat driver into the other plane, thereby eliminating both problems, before getting on the radio and asking, “Where would the Admiral like his nukes delivered?” This scene is simply classic Bond. He defies direct orders and saves the world and does it in a remarkably cavalier fashion which leaves no doubt to the viewer that he or she is in for another classic Bond adventure.

                After the title sequence featuring a Bond song by Sheryl Crow, which is kind of a typical Bond song in that it’s not quite bad but definitely nothing to write home about, we rejoin the film as it begins to get more and more convoluted. As I’ve mentioned before this is You Only Live Twice: Part Deux, so the basic plot is that a super-rich evil villain is trying to start World War III for his own personal gain by this time playing the UK against China (in YOLT it was the US v. Russia) This super villain is actually a great casting choice with the classic Jonathan Pryce (who also plays the governor in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series) and he is wonderful as sort of a Bill Gates/ Rupert Murdoch hybrid media mogul who is so obsessed with himself that he’s turned to making news (by starting WWIII) rather than reporting it.  As it turns out his wife, who is played by the gorgeous voluptuous (and at the time secretly preggo in real life) Teri Hatcher, used to be James Bond’s girlfriend, so Bond is sent to “pump” her for information. There is a long scene where M directly uses the word pump to imply the Bond should copulate with her exclusively for the Queen’s purposes, which I also happen to think is great, and also it’s worth noting that this is the first time in franchise history that Bond definitely knows for sure that the woman he is copulating with is the villain’s wife and he still does it anyways.  Anyways, super villain doesn’t like this and kills his own wife and plans on having Bond killed. Bond of course escapes and goes on to save the day but first he has a fantastic car chase.

                As I’ve mentioned before this film is filled with really great, gritty, action sequences which definitely help the viewer to forget that this film is sort of a re-hash of older Connery Bond. One of the most memorable is Bond’s escape in Hamburg using his remote controlled BMW 750iL sedan. First off I should note that the use of this vehicle in the movie is still a direct result of Eon production’s deal with BMW and also this is the first and only time to date that James Bond is given a 4 door sedan by Q branch (though there have been rumors that Bond is driving the all new Aston Martin Rapide touring Saloon in Skyfall, but I have yet to see that film yet, and even if he is, the 4 door Aston is and will always be on a completely separate level from pretty much any BMW). Anyways, way before any of us had color screens (or even smart phones), James Bond drives the life out of this big dawg BMW with nothing more than his cell phone. In real life the filming of all the crazy stunt work in this sequence required no less than 17 BMWs, plenty of which were completely destroyed. Another great action sequence in this film is the BMW motorcycle chase through the streets of Vietnam while Bond is not only handcuffed to his Chinese spy counterpart and co-star Michelle Yeoh, but also being pursued by very dedicated helicopter borne villains. Now, everyone whom I’ve read (incuding Brosnan) really likes Yeoh because she did almost all of her own stunt work and was very dedicated to the film, but personally I think they should have forgone the obvious racial overtones and cast an actress who was prettier to play against Bond. The fact that they cast an Asian person seems to really seal the deal for me on YOLT: part 2, and I would have really liked it if culturally the world was ready to not need stereotyping in our films. Also worth note is that Natasha Henstridge (fresh off her superb performance in Species) auditioned numerous times for the role that Yeoh eventually got and would have been way better without the production team conceding to obvious racial stereotyping.

                I would advise watching this film. It’s a lot of fun to watch even though it’s definitely the weakest of the Brosnan Bonds. I feel comfortable telling you that Bond saves the day and the film ends happily without fear of spoiling too much for you. I can’t tell you that you won’t feel a little empty inside afterwards like you need to watch another Bond to make your experience whole, but on the bright side this is one of the very few Bond films shorter than two hours so you should have plenty of rainy day left to view another Bond film from the Canon.