REVENGE is a dish best served with bullets, high explosives and giant rolling flameballs. In “Quantum of Solace,” James Bond orders the revenge buffet, deluxe.
We begin just after “Casino Royale,” with Bond’s girlfriend Vesper dead and her (other, missing) boyfriend suspected in forcing the events that led to her death, which was perhaps the first suicide by drowning in an elevator yet recorded on-screen.
With Vesper gone, the only woman around who understands Bond (a well-scuffed Daniel Craig) is Judi Dench’s M, and the way these two hurl flameball glances at each other re-creates the kind of raw sexual tension unseen since the early days of the Siskel and Ebert show. Who needs Moneypenny when you’ve got Wenchy Denchy?
M gets betrayed by her own bodyguard, who is linked to another assassin for whom 007 is mistaken in Haiti by a lynxlike cutie (Olga Kurylenko) who picks Bond up, tries to kill him and introduces him to this evening’s villain: Greene (Mathieu Amalric of “Munich”). Greene, as you might guess from his name, is an enviro-goon (I’ve had my eye on those tree-huggers for just this kind of skullduggery) who, under the cover of his conservationist (i.e. destructionist) group, is fomenting a coup in Bolivia in a swap for a worthless piece of desert land.
You can never take a coup-fomenter at his word, though, and Amalric has the smirky menace to suggest the sleaze of Roman Polanski (both in “Chinatown” and real life). Greene turns out to be well-connected: Among his Facebook friends are the CIA, who share their private plane with Greene as they lead the cheers for his coup. In the background, you can see the favored reading material of these malefactors: The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Bond even manages to turn the Brits against him. The character has never been taken to such extremes, never before been such a cold, isolated bastard. He leaves a friend dead in a garbage bin, dispenses with all niceties (there is no “Bond, James Bond,” no casino scene, no loyalty to anyone but himself). When he drinks, it isn’t to be suave, it’s to get drunk. He can’t sleep. “I don’t have any friends,” he says. Possibly only the Dark Knight and Dick Cheney are as unpopular. The man has been worked as hard as his poor Aston Martin, the one that gets its driver’s side door clipped off in the opening chase.
Which is the first of the many action scenes that turn up as regularly as Weather on the 1’s. There’s no use pretending that the story has any purpose except to link the chase-ems-and-shoot-ems, but director Marc Forster (previously associated with semi-arty films “Monster’s Ball,” “Finding Neverland”) borrows heavily from the Bourne movies, racing through jagged close-ups that thrust you in the middle, gasping. Forster even turns a phone call into a blaze of graphics that suggests John King simultaneously charting the House, Senate and White House races. I personally would have a lot more confidence in our spy agencies if they could at least come up with a cool interface to explain why they can’t find bin Laden.
The action geometry can be muddled. During a rooftop chase in Siena that involves breaking scaffolding, a flying girder, Tarzanish clinging to ropes and sheets of breaking glass, I wasn’t sure whether it was Bond or the villain who yelled, “Aaaagh!” Nor could I figure out what was happening in the airplane chase, or how it is that a parachute that opens 6 inches before you hit the ground is going to keep you from shattering into subatomic fragments. But does it matter? Being equally thrilling and confusing certainly made the seventh-grade dance memorable, and it works for Forster.
Classic-yet-new is also tricky. With a script by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, Forster manages. The wit is as dry as the rocky desert where Greene stores his nefarious dreams: “Don’t bleed to death,” “When they say, ‘We’ve got people everywhere,’ you expect it to be hyperbole.” A surprise reference to “Goldfinger” is worked in beautifully, while “He just smiled at me – and set the house on fire” and “Yeah, you’re right, we should just deal with nice people” bring a bitter hurt unknown to, say, Pierce Brosnan’s Bond, the non-brute with the invisi-car.
Kurylenko, who looks like a cross between Ami½lie and Thandie Newton, is a big Bond-aid, too: I’m not going to mention the names of any actress who failed on this score, but a Bond Girl must be not only beautiful but also interesting. Denise Richards.
Where “Quantum” falls well short of “Casino Royale” is in the ending. This one is bland, James Bland. Key characters meet their fates off-screen, and it’s only because the Bond music blasts you out of your seat to hustle in the next crowd that you know the thing is done. We can only hope the next chapter will deliver something that would burn as hot as Keith Olbermann’s temper: Bond vs. Bourne.