Saw "Quantum of Solace" last night- let's just place it somewhere in the middle of the Bond canon. Below "Casino Royale," every Connery movie and "Goldeneye," but above the Timothy Dalton outings.
Thematically and stylistically, 'Quantum' owes a great deal more to the "Bourne" films than it does to earlier films in the Bond series. It's got the existential angst, it's got the brooding and joylessness- and it's also got (worst of all) the shaky-cam. Every action sequence subscribes to the jittery, hand-held, enemy-of-coherence fad, popularized by the Bourne movies and copied in the last couple of years by pretty much every single action movie that's been made by Hollywood.
This has long bothered me, but I talked to two other critics as I was leaving the screening and it was the first thing they mentioned, too. Also, you know that scene, that happened about 20 times in the Bourne movies, when Matt Damon walks into a room, some guy jumps out of the shadows to attack him, they have an incoherent fight for 25 seconds, and then the other guy ends up dead? 'Quantum' lifts that, pretty much verbatim.
And also, much worse in fact, is a whole sequence- a shootout during an opera performance- lifted directly from the climax of "The Godfather, Part III."
I'm a fan of director Marc Forster. His "Stranger Than Fiction" is an underrated gem, he did a good job with the "Kite Runner" movie, and I like "Monster's Ball" a lot more than most people. But action is clearly not his forte.
On the plus side, the villain- played by the guy who gave Eric Bana the names in "Munich"- was excellent, the plot not so bad either, and I liked the primary Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko) a lot and the secondary one (Gemma Arterton) even more.
Stephanie Zacharek agrees with me:
Forster seems to think that fast cutting alone makes an action sequence exciting, and to that end he's ripped numerous pages out of the "Bourne" movies, only they're the wrong pages. The editing in the Bourne movies, no matter how fast it is, is always coherent. Forster, on the other hand, pays little attention to the space people occupy in the frame; in most cases it's impossible to know who's coming from where, and why, let alone what they think they're doing.I still don't understand why directors, again and again, make this stupid choice. Might as well put a black sheet in front of the screen.