The last line of the Casino Royale, the novel, is, “The bitch is dead.”
The line is used in the 2006 film adaptation, though buried in the second to last scene, and in a lot of ways, it hangs over the new Bond movie opening today, Quantum Of Solace.
As far as reviews go, there isn’t much to say here, and I’ll try to be as spoiler-lite as possible, but this is basically a film about a lost man chasing after something resembling closure and using himself as a weapon to smash through anything that could possibly get in his way. He has his sights set on a group of people he holds responsible for the loss of the woman he was starting to love, and for the loss of his trust in even her memory, and he intends to smash them into the same pieces that he feels he’s been left in. All of that looks a little something like this:
In passing small talk with a stranger yesterday, I mentioned that I had seen Quantum Of Solace already and their first question to me was not “Was it good?” as you, and definitely I, would expect, but “Was it a good Bond movie?”
The simple answer to that right now is I don’t know. I can tell you right now that it’s the greatest Bourne movie that you’ve ever seen. A lot of the same behind the scenes people from the Bourne flicks were brought over to work on this, and you can tell in the level of super frenetic always on the go action scenes, only clearer. You really felt the hyper adrenaline rush in the last Bourne flick, but quite often, due to weird camera work and incredibly jarring editing, you couldn’t tell what the fuck was going on and were left feeling a little ill. The only time Quantum Of Solace comes close to suffering that is in the pre-title car chase, but it’s done with a certain level of artistry and beautiful cinematography that the Bourne films, under both Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass, never seemed to possess. But what that opening car chase lacks in clarity, it more than makes up for in raw power.
That said, I think it’s somewhat indicative to point out that before the movie even hits the 15 minute mark, there’s been at least three decent and fairly violent action sequences/chase scenes.
The villain this time around is a man named Dominic Greene, head of a well known company working to fight global warming, but secretly a member of the cabal that manipulated the woman Bond loves in the previous film. I’m fascinated by this organization, a kind of SPECTRE for the 21st century, made up of well known figures and members of various espionage outfits. They have an ingenius method for all being in the same room for their meetings without being photographed or linked together. But it’s Greene himself, who’s basically just a smug little prick, that helps make this outing so interesting in a real world sense. Dominic Greene could be any ruthless business man, a charming philanphropist side seen above the water and never showing what leaks beneath the surface. One review I read said that he could be Al Gore or Richard Branson, and Mathieu Amalric, the actor who plays him and was in Munich and The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, said that he played the character with “the smile of Tony Blair and the craziness of Sarkozy.”
The other refreshing factor with the villain isn’t that he wants to steal a bunch of nukes and hold the world hostage for one hundred BILLIONS of dollars. His nefarious scheme seems very plausible and incredibly grounded in the real world. You can see him discuss his ultimate goal in the trailer a bit when he says “this is the world’s most precious resource and we need to control as much of it as possible.” You should really be able to guess what that resource is.
Then there’s the ladies… Amazing to me that the leading lady in this film gets the shit for being the flimsiest, when to me, she seems to be one of the more capable of Bond girls we’ve had. I mean, do you people remember Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones? Trust me, it can get so much worse than Olga Kurylenko’s remarkably driven Camille who is singular in her goal in this film, her passion for revenge nicely complimenting Bond’s own.
The other Bond girl in this outing is named Strawberry Fields (Forever!), played by the lovely Gemma Arterton (who apparently has an extra finger or two), and right from the get go, you know she’s there for to be eye candy and to fuck Bond and to… well, guess. These films are incredibly sexist beasts by their very design (though less so in the Daniel Craig years, I would say), Agent Fields knows what Bond wants and even though he uses quite possibly the flimsiest line in cinema history to lure her into bed, she doesn’t come off as an idiot or a tricked woman. She beds him because she wants to, and I could be wrong, but is there anything more feminist than that?
And then of course there’s Dame Judi Dench who just commands more and more of these films as she goes on, and rightfully so. I was rewatching bits of both Goldeneye and Casino Royale the other day and some of her best scenes are when she gets to verbally dress down Bond as the Cold War hold over/misogynist dinosaur that he is. Craig is growing more and more solid in these films not as the suave, good looking superspy that we’re used to, but as the ugly and messed up guy, the violent creature that would probably inhabit this role in real life. Will he eventually turn into Roger Moore or Sean Connery in this role (or even Pierce Brosnan, who started off with a certain Connery-ish flavor and then eventually melted into more solid Roger Moore territory) or will he be something else altogether? It’ll be fun to watch.
It will also be interesting to see where the series goes following this entry, being that Casino Royale was a new set up in their reboot program and Quantum Of Solace was a straight sequel, springing to life probably about an hour after where Royale left off (with it’s proud announcement of “The name’s Bond… James Bond,” a line sadly, but rightfully, not appearing in this current film). Marc Forster, kind of the king of indie acclaim already, does a competent job, but other than bringing a lovely framing to the images and empowering his set designers to to channel a little of that classic Ken Adam vibe, he appears to be mostly staying out of the way and letting the action and the pathos work their magic.
It’s disgusting how much more I could go on about this film, this series, all of it, but I should put a cork in it here. I have one more Bond post in me, just as I threatened in my previous one, talking about the rejected music of the series, but until then… Go see the movie. I want to know what you think.
