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Watching it again on Showtime, perhaps ten months later, I learned that I am a Grade-A idiot. Casino Royale has it all. Bond is suave and slick and his anger comes from real raw emotion when he is jilted by his true love. The settings: Miami, southern France, et al, are sumptuous, as is Eva Green, who teases us with her eyes and her sharp tongue instead of her body. I was excited to see what the franchise would do for a follow up, and to see how Forster would rise to the challenge of making a direct sequel to Royale (another first for a Bond flick, since they are usually part of the same anthology, but storylines do not carry over into the following film).

My reaction was at first quite positive – Quantum featured a very sexy Bond girl and mostly competent sequences on planes, boats, car, motorcycle, and foot. There was an excellent climactic set piece set on a highly flammable eco-hotel and at least one or two unexpected twists. But then I settled in for a second viewing not more than a few months later. Boy was I a Grade-A idiot – again. Quantum of Solace is thin. I mean paper-thin. There are plot holes into which you can crash a jumbo-sized aircraft carrier – which Bond does in fact, in one of the flick’s most egregious requests for the audience to suspend disbelief. Bond was never meant to be a very plausible series, but if you’re going to set up Quantum as a hyper-real, emotional follow-up to Royale, than you should at least try to craft a script that successfully introduces its action sequences. Maybe the script isn’t entirely Forster’s fault. But what about those action sequences? A second viewing exposes more than one or two of them as frauds. Quantum of Solace is either the victim of over editing with too much cutting to tell what is happening, or of poor filming where nothing coherent perhaps ever made it onto the camera to begin with.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, I have to point out that Bond is not a heartless cold-blooded killer. He is a lover (and perhaps a misogynist) as well. He kills when he must, as he does in Royale, but he is just too angry, too blunt, too Bourne, in Quantum. In Royale, the blending of suave and sophisticated with brute and emotional worked to sublime effect. In Quantum, Bond is enslaved to the latter qualities. Maybe that was unavoidable because of how the first film’s plot feeds in to the second. But lets hope that if MGM ever gets off the schneid that they let Bond relax his shoulders a little bit and have some fun. How else are we going to enjoy all of that globe trotting spy work if it’s always so damn solemn? Forster didn’t ruin the Bond franchise, and Quantum certainly isn’t the least competent entry of the 21 so far. Forster never puts Bond in a jet pack and his car never has a cloak of invisibility, so it wins points on those two fronts. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give Forster too much love – neither from Russia nor any other place – but I’ll give him a pass, since following up Casino Royale would have proved challenging for anyone.

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