I.

You’ll
hear everything you need to know about “Quantum of Solace” in the
opening strains of the film’s brazen theme song, performed by Jack
White and Alicia Keys. As golden Bond girls slink across sand dunes
onscreen, White’s electric guitar tears through the familiar notes of
the James Bond theme, transposed to a dissonant key and distorted into
a coarse howl. Keys’ piano peals a harsh, steady clang, and before long
both singers are nearly howling their duet at each other over a
slam-crash-banging drum kit and piercing brass hits. This noise is Bond
stripped bare, tempered by violence, turned up to an angry eleven—and
it is thrilling.

So it is with the rest of “Quantum,” the careening, crashing sequel to
2006 Bond reboot “Casino Royale,” which opens right where the last film
left off: with Daniel Craig’s stoic spy weaving and smashing through
high speed, high altitude Italian traffic behind the wheel of an Aston
Martin, a clutch of Alfa Romeos close behind. One of them slams
straight into a truck, but there is no cinematic fireball, just a
crunching noise and a reflexive cringe from the audience.

“Casino Royale” showed us the birth of Bond as an “anonymous, blunt
instrument,” as Ian Fleming once envisioned him. It destroyed the
demigod iceberg surfer played by Pierce Brosnan and built a character
at once more cruel and more human. “Quantum” continues this study, by
using that blunt instrument to smash stuff for 106 minutes. “There’s
something horribly efficient about you,” croons Camille (Olga
Kurlyenko), Bond’s lovely and equally vengeance-obsessed Bolivian
accomplice, after he issues her a curt order partway through the film.
She’s right: Craig is a Brutalist Bond, not just in form (though he is all angles and hard planes save for those frigid blue eyes), but also in deed.

For
Bond, determined to kill his grief over his dead lover with the same
indifferent ruthlessness he employs to dispatch faceless heavies,
violence is therapy, and here there is plenty of it. Director Marc
Forster’s action sequences are efficient, too, trimmed down to nothing
more than noisy kinetic bursts of non-Euclidean jump cuts. But
confusing as they may be, they are exciting, a string of adrenal chases
across three continents and cringe-inducing crash permutations of
planes, speedboats, and expensive automobiles.

The plot, penned by Paul Haggis, Neil Purvis, and Robert Wade, revolves
around Gallic “green collar” entrepreneur and crypto-coupmaker Dominic
Greene, played with a quantum of camp and a soupçon of sleaze by
Mathieu Amalric. Greene meets most of the basic requirements for Bond
villiany. He has a remote lair in the desert, a blank-faced Slavic
frankenstein of a henchman, and a secret plan to topple the Bolivian
government, replace it with a military strongman approved by the CIA,
and corner the local water supply on behalf of a cabal of international
criminals. But the convoluted plot (unaided by the frenetic pace of the
film’s action sequences) is the least important element of “Quantum,”
and in the end it all seems about as threatening as a scheme cooked up
by the local utility board. Tying together moments of Bond SMASH! takes
precedence over clearing up just why Bond needs to muck about in the
parched corners of the Atacama or exactly how the most clever
adversaries of British intelligence decided to set up shop in the
world’s most desolate and flammable Motel 6.

Along the way, Bond meets a similarly vendetta oriented partner
(Kurlyenko), and endlessly frustrates both his own handlers (“If you
could avoid killing every possible lead, it would be deeply
appreciated,” snaps Judi Dench’s M) and foreign spooks, including Felix
Leiter (Jeffrey Wright, reprising his terse role in “Casino”), before
wrapping things up with an explosive, unsurprising denouement.

The anemic storyline leaves this film defined more by the things that Bond does not
do. It’s not until halfway through the movie that he finally beds the
beautiful bureaucrat sent to retrieve him on behalf of the British
government (Gemma Arterton as the deliciously named Strawberry Fields),
and even then he seems to lie back and think of England before trotting
off to continue the chase. He finds her body later, dumped by Greene in
a precious allusion to an earlier Bond movie murder, another victim of
this film’s all-too-serious tone. Nor does Bond ever swagger to the bar
to order a vodka martini. In fact, the only time he imbibes is aboard a
plane en route from one action scene to another, when he quaffs six
cocktails named after his dead lover Vesper Lynd and stares off into
space. Even the sex and booze have a singular focus—and it’s sure not a
fun one.

That’s
the problem with paring down the artifice that conceals Bond’s soul:
strip away the witty quips, the flings with besobriquetted femmes fatale,
the didactic taste for luxury goods—two legs of what Paul Johnson once
called the “sex, snobbery, and sadism” underlying the Bond mythos, and
one is left with a long series of creative stabbings and explosions and
spectacular scraps, a brooding lead…and not much else.

The
idea of humanizing Bond is a splendid one, and the trick worked in
“Casino,” largely because nobody had done it before. In “Quantum,” we
continue to see a Bond who makes mistakes. He takes a painful
bone-crunching fall onto a balcony and slips perilously along the
decrepit tiles of a Siena rooftop. He gets dirty and haggard and soggy
and cut up. He finds himself schlepping the body of a confidante into a
dumpster. But for all the punishment he takes, Bond is still the kind
of character who jumps with a girl from a plummeting airplane with just
one parachute, only to make a fantastic landing in an abandoned
mineshaft, stand up moments later, brush some dust from his scuffed but
striking Tom Ford suit and discover, within two minutes, a convenient
exit. It’s not quite a Sunday drive in the invisible car, but it sure
comes close.

This
Bond may fuck up—but he can never fail. Which leads one to wonder: in
spite of the slams and sulks, can James Bond ever really be human at
all?