Quantum of Solace introduces us to the most nefarious Bond villain to date: Whichever Hollywood asshole decided that changing the camera angle every two seconds is in any way entertaining or even acceptable. Quantum of Solace is without question the most extreme example of this unfortunate cultural phenomenon that I have ever had the displeasure of seeing. This movie cuts around enough to give a blind man an epileptic seizure. I am not exaggerating when I say that within the first half hour of Quantum of Solace, there is literally not one ten-second stretch of the movie that does not include an entirely unnecessary change of camera angle. Nor is this limited to the action scenes. Even during expositional scenes, the camera inexplicably cuts between angles, often in the middle of sentences.
This movie is also missing much of what we expect to see in a Bond film. There's no Bond movie villain, no Bond movie villain henchman, and not much of a nefarious plan. Where's the guy with the metal hat, or the guy with the metal teeth, or the guy with the metal hands? Where's the giant space laser or the nuclear blackmail plot, where's the secret volcano lair? The villain this time out is a phony environmentalist who's built a dam in the middle of the desert, and his nefarious plan is, get this, he's gonna build more dams. Despite the world-spanning power of SPECTRE, ahem, I mean QUANTUM (I guess that's what they're calling the ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule to world in this new century), a VW bus full of Greenpeace activists could have handled the villain quite as well as our favorite British Secret Service agent.
I'm also bewildered by the decision to omit both of Bond's signature lines from this movie. At no point does "Bond, James Bond" introduce himself as such, and instead of ordering his martini in the usual fashion, he allows the bartender to explain to a friend what he's drinking in exhaustive detail, right down to the molecular composition. To compensate for this, the movie includes a throwback to arguably the most famous Bond movie scene of all time, presumably so that the viewers won't forget that they're supposedly watching a James Bond film.
I want to point out that this is not necessarily a bad film. It's just badly filmed. There's at least 25% of a good Bond film here, it's just hidden by crappy camera work. Quantum of Solace has its good points. The acting is all that you could ask from a blockbuster action movie. I particularly love Daniel Craig's take on Bond as a vengeance-obsessed sadistic psychopath who will pull a friend in front of him to take a bullet, then unceremoniously toss the body into a dumpster after said friend forgives him with his dying words. I also don't expect to see character growth in a Bond movie, but this movie gives it to us. Without spoiling much, let's just say that in the last outing the climax involved water, and this time it involves fire, and the outcome is different. There's also plenty of stunts which straddle the line between "totally awesome" and "absolute horseshit", most notably a scene in which a parachute which opens five feet above the ground saves two people at once, but we viewers have to take the movie's word for it that these stunts actually happened, because the hyperactive editing means that we never get to see the stunts in their entirety.
I can only recommend Quantum of Solace if both:
A. You are truly desperate to see a new Bond film, and
B. You are utterly unoffended by choppy camera work.
Otherwise, let's hope that the next Bond film is edited by somebody who actually knows how to edit, as this potentially good Bond film is crippled by the worst editing of any film I've seen in this century.
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Topic: Quantum of Solace: My review, your thoughts (Read 2891 times)