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In the final moments of Casino Royale, a piercingly blue-eyed Daniel Craig holds the conniving career criminal known as Mr White (Jesper Christensen) at gunpoint on the steps of his Lake Como villa. “The name’s Bond,” the spy says coolly to his captive. You can probably finish the rest of that sentence.
Despite the intense scrutiny Craig endured prior to its release, the 21st entry in the 007 franchise would prove to be an era-defining take on a truly modern-day Bond. If past iterations saw him reduced to a smattering of cliches, all parodied to death over the years, Craig’s debut as the suave secret agent was lauded for being a stripped-down, back-to-basics approach to a character audiences were already familiar with.
Its sequel, however, was considerably less well received. Picking up just hours after the events of Casino Royale, 2008’s Quantum of Solace finds a heartbroken Bond licking his wounds after the betrayal and death of his lover Vesper Lynd (Eva Green).
When billionaire environmentalist Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) opts to back a Bolivian military coup in exchange for control of the country’s energy resources, Bond is sent from the rooftops of Siena all the way to the desert plains of the Atacama to unfurl the emerging conspiracy. But ultimately, it’s his burning rage over Vesper’s death that fuels his mission.
Quantum of Solace was famously plagued by a troublesome production (a 2007 Writers Guild of America strike forced Craig and director Marc Forster to rewrite key sections of the script themselves) which critics lamented upon its release, including Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw who wrote that “the smart elegance of [Casino Royale] had been toned down in favour of conventional action”. For a franchise typically regarded as being a cut above the usual Hollywood blockbuster fare, the abrasive nature of Quantum seemed more befitting of adrenaline-junkie film-makers such as Michael Bay or Paul Greengrass than the classy British export it had come to be known as. Even ex-Bond Roger Moore took umbrage with the film’s coarse style, saying in 2009 “there was a bit too much flash cutting for me”.
From the very first frame of its opening car chase through the Apennine mountains though, it’s clear the sensual coolness of Bond’s previous outing has been overridden by a more unpredictable, but still motivated, kind of mayhem. The 007 we meet at the start of Quantum is a ticking timebomb full of rage, his intense disposition over Vesper’s death only outdone by the fiery explosions he frequently finds himself surrounded by. Forster’s aggressive, shaky-cam cinematography and jarring editing aligns seamlessly with this fractured psychology, and from the moment Alicia Keys croons about Bond’s “slick trigger finger” in the rock-heavy opening title Another Way to Die, initially written off as “screechy” and uncharacteristic, it becomes evident our hero has embraced his role as a state-sanctioned instrument of death, laser-focused on his mission, no matter the fallout.
That macabre side to the franchise is reflected in a later scene at a Bolivian hotel, when one of the film’s Bond Girls – a bubbly redhead MI6 agent named Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton) – meets her demise after being painted head to toe in crude oil, a similar death to Jill Masterson’s in Goldfinger that smartly demonstrated the shift in global commodities since Bond’s cold war origins.
At the centre of all this mayhem is Craig, whose performance as the Byronic spy remains unimpeachable, guiding us through Bond’s increasingly erratic journey no matter how ruthless it gets. As one of the film’s other femme fatales, Bolivian intelligence agent Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko), slyly says to him: “There’s something horribly efficient about you.”
A similar observation is made by Greene at a glitzy charity dinner in La Paz, when the sleazy businessman remarks that “everything [Bond] touches withers and dies” – a comment that’s reinforced moments later when one of our hero’s closest allies is killed. Bond’s response? Calmly buttoning up his suit to conceal the deep crimson bloodstains on his crisp linen shirt, a clever character beat underscoring the movie’s cynical, realist approach to contemporary intelligence work; one that had long evaded an escapist fantasy like 007. If only other franchise films were this brutally honest.
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Quantum of Solace is available to rent or buy on Apple TV and Prime Video in Australia, the UK and the US. It’s also available to stream on Netflix in the US. Find more recommendations of what to stream in Australia here
