In development even before the beginning of production on Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace would push through a punishing production schedule and a writer’s strike to release just two years after its predecessor. With Casino Royale having been favourably received by critics and audiences alike, could the studio maintain that momentum with a story that broke Bond tradition in how closely it tied into the previous entry?

No.

Thanks for coming, and I’ll see you all for the next entry in this series, 2012’s Skyfall.

Oh, I’m being told by my editor that he’s going to need a little more from me on this. Well, if you insist…

Quantum of Solace is not generally well-received by… well, anyone. Craig himself is on record describing it as a ‘shit show’. Critics have advanced various complaints from a dull plot to a nonsensical title and a theme tune which you can’t even hum (yes really). For many years, I have been one of the few champions of the film, arguing that it was in fact much better than most gave it credit for. In the cold light of this re-watch, I’ve been forced to adjust that opinion somewhat. I still don’t agree that the movie is inherently without value, but if anything I find myself frustrated simply by the flashes it gives us of the movie it could have been on the way to becoming what it is.

Let’s start at the beginning – personally I love the initial car chase sequence, even if it does rather do away with Casino Royale’s commitment to avoiding as many Bond tropes as possible. I mean come on, baddies chasing our hero in sinister, blacked out cars? But the way the film throws us into that sequence, and then another, extended on foot chase through the streets of Sienna before we’ve even got to the opening credits is impressive and pacy. It feels like a statement of intent and to some extent it is, this being one of the punchier Bond movies at under two hours long, and fairly relentless in its kinetic pace.

It is, however, emblematic of the first issue with the movie – that while it clearly has a defined main arc, it’s stuffed with ideas which feel almost haphazardly thrown in there in service of it along the way. M’s personal bodyguard suddenly being outed as a Quantum employee feels almost like plot by mad-libs. There’s no real narrative sense to it, and though it’s intended to reinforce just how shadowy and insidious Quantum is, it feels oddly tacked on and never really gets explained.

As to those opening credits, more leaning on the tropes of old as we get a succession of scantily clad ladies gyrating in shadowy outline while the thumping title tune plays. Another Way to Die is an atonal, odd song, contrasting the refined lyrical style of Alicia Keys with the somewhat crunchier sound of Jack White. It’s a song which (contrary to certain critics) can be hummed, but it never really feels like a Bond theme. Where You Know My Name felt intrinsically wedded to its movie both in tone, musical style and lyrics, this feels like a song which could attach to almost any film, and does therefore feel slightly anonymous as a result. Certainly the one thing it doesn’t feel like is a Bond theme.

That main plot arc continues from where we left off – Bond pursuing vengeance against the people who manipulated Vesper, including her ‘kidnapped’ boyfriend, while M tells him not to. It’s certainly a first for the series – though From Russia with Love had followed loosely from Dr No, it didn’t have nearly the same narrative continuity. Bond here feels a whole lot different from the previous film. The confidence has strayed over into cockiness, the naivety has been replaced by deep cynicism and that line of Vesper’s about women being ‘disposable pleasures rather than meaningful pursuits’ ironically rings truer than ever here, given that the main Bond Girl Camille is someone he shows no romantic or sexual interest in whatsoever and the other main woman in his life is M, here being very much developed as a mother figure to the agent.

Worse, where M had chided him to be more than a blunt instrument in the last film, here he’s gotten considerably worse. The movie tries to make a sort of running gag out of the fact that every lead he chases down ends up dead, but again it’s difficult to reconcile this rash, careless habit of killing every bad guy he’s sent to interrogate with the careful, considered approach we saw in Casino Royale. Bad guy after bad guy simply gets snuffed out as MI6 flail in the dark trying to work out who exactly they are up against and even though M repeatedly admonishes him for this and even has his status revoked, she still ‘trusts’ him and basically allows him to carry on barrelling around the world like the maverick he is.

On the subject of women, the film feels somewhat at odds with itself. On the one hand we have Camille, a capable, sexually aggressive agent on a single-minded mission to kill the man who murdered her family. That mission happens to intersect with Bond’s because the man she’s been sleeping with to get to her target is working with Quantum, but ultimately that’s as far as their connection goes. Bond ‘rescues’ her early on and then ends up working alongside and almost mentoring her by the end, and aside from one farewell kiss, has no real intimacy beyond protectiveness with her for the entire movie. The main issue is that Camille is really a cypher for much of the movie, and like M’s Bodyguard, seems to just randomly develop in service to whatever the plot needs to do next rather than in any organic way.

Then there’s M, who here has graduated from Bond’s cold-blooded mentor who sees potential in her agent into basically a motherly figure to him. The script tries to sidestep this by having Bond ruefully declare at one point that M ‘likes to think she is’ his mother, but there’s no real escaping the tonal shift, and that feels like it’s reinforcing the sort of sexist trope which should really have been left buried in the previous century – that women can be either sirens or mothers and that’s about it.

Not helping that impression is the movie’s other ‘major’ female role, agent Fields (credited as Strawberry Fields though never actually named so in the script). Fields is a plucky young desk agent who immediately (and unaccountably) falls into bed with James and then has one brief shining moment where she trips over a bad guy before being quietly killed offscreen and left naked on a bed covered in oil. Disposable indeed.

Another oft-voiced complaint I’ve seen of the movie revolves around its villain/villains, and on this one I am more inclined to give the thing credit. Still unable to use SPECTRE at the time, the script settles on Quantum, a secret evil organisation operating globally and almost completely undetected by intelligence services. Like Casino Royale, rather than have Quantum be the main focus of the movie itself, the script has its ‘main villain’ be a man working for them. Unlike its predecessor, the film doesn’t deliver us a man with the charisma and screen presence of Mads Mikkelsen. To Mathieu Amalric’s credit, he does what he can with Dominic Greene, but the issue is that like much of the movie’s cast, Greene feels more like screen furniture designed to usher along certain plot points than an organic adversary. His evil plan relating to Bolivia feels a little over-signposted, to the point where it feels odd that the CIA, who are literally working with him, haven’t been able to figure it out. His relationship with Camille is particularly odd, recalling historical Bond villains having ‘friendly’ dinners with our hero and such. There’s no real reason for Greene not to simply kill Camille on sight every time she reappears, and yet he just… doesn’t. It doesn’t help Amalric’s case that the script literally has him be some guy Camille is trying to climb over to get to her real quarry, nor that that quarry (General Medrano) is so grossly underdeveloped, barely seen in the movie and essentially written as a walking cliché whose character traits are that he likes to rape and murder women and… nope, that’s about it, as far as I can tell.

But what of the better movie I spoke of buried under all this? We see it in flashes mainly. Giancarlo Giannini returns as Mathis, the agent Bond was convinced had betrayed him and who he had tortured for it. The relationship which develops between the two here is beautifully rendered. Mathis is wise, slightly prickly but ultimately big-hearted and also unable to resist the lure of one last adventure. Their frank exchanges on the subjects of grief and forgiveness are genuinely well done, and Mathis’ death scene is touching without veering into saccharine, perfectly capped off by Bond’s dropping his body in a dumpster and telling Camille ‘He wouldn’t mind.’ I’d happily watch a whole film of Craig and Giannini acting together, and it feels criminal we don’t get more of them here.

Similarly, Jeffrey Wright is once again magnetic as Felix Leiter, the CIA agent with a somewhat fractious relationship with his colleagues and superiors and still not 100% sure he can trust Bond, nor Bond him Stuck alongside David Harbour’s Gregg Beam, a CIA section chief with seemingly no curiosity or talent, Leiter furiously smoulders his way through every scene and once again, you feel strongly that more screen time was more than warranted for the character.

It’s also a more mature take on the genre as a whole in many ways. The plot regarding water being effectively stolen and held to ransom feels doubly relevant in the modern day with the current cost of living crisis, and was of course based on the historical events of the Cochabamba Water Revolt. It’s a shame then that the film chooses to somewhat bury this plot amongst all the other side plots it almost feels like are being made up on the fly, all of which act to distract from and ultimately somewhat undermine it.

In the end, it’s a film which doesn’t really know what it wants to be. A direct sequel focused on Bond’s need for revenge at the loss of his love? A topical commentary on various modern political issues? A revenge story for Camille? The beginning of the Quantum mythos? It’s all of these and more, but each is handled too clumsily, pushed together so haphazardly, that ultimately it can’t help but feel oddly unsatisfying.

A shitshow? Perhaps not, but certainly not the sequel Casino Royale needed or deserved.