Written by Nick Da Costa | Thursday, November 27, 2008 | Comment on this article | + Share
Hey, wasn’t Casino Royale good. An accomplished reboot of a stale, campy franchise that managed to retain enough of the humour, sex, and spectacle from the classic Bonds while introducing a new, grittier, more grounded 007 in the crystal blue and granite shape of Daniel Craig.
I say again, wasn’t Casino Royale good. Yeah, keep reminding yourself of that because at no point in the 106 confused minutes of this now unsubtle homage to the infinitely better Bourne franchise will you find one iota of the fun you had with the previous film.
Now on the surface this isn’t particularly fair, the filmmakers clearly positioning Quantum as an extended, and very brutal epilogue to Casino and thematically the structure makes sense. In essence it’s a bloody final act of revenge, driven with blunt force trauma. In a perfect world this would all have worked. Unfortunately as two separate films, it doesn’t.
Ignoring the fact that some of the less cerebral audience members will have forgotten most of the important plot details and characters from the first film, there’s still a chance they could have made this work if they’d only carried across the template from the first film. The action heavy nature of the revenge theme could have supported the plot, suffusing the myriad sequences with the same clever character details and plot elements as in Casino, unfortunately the template isn’t and so it can’t.
Instead of unique twists on staid scenarios it’s opening car chase followed by rooftop chase, then boat chase and oh look there’s a plane and so on, as per the pattern; cue the yawns. Not that the action is terrible, a savage fight in a Haiti and a tussle on ropes helps ease the pain caused by some of the miserable editing in other sequences, it’s just firstly a crushing disappointment from what we’ve come to expect and secondly a major stumbling block to our understanding of the film.
Potentially the introduction of Spect..I mean Quantum is one of the better franchise conformities. Unfortunately it demands a more epic storytelling approach which the few minutes between action sequences can’t provide. Instead of building towards a dramatic and exhilarating clash between Bond and his nemesis, one worthy of the wonderfully malignant Mathieu Almaric, we get a rather limp encounter that has little substance because we’re too dizzy from all the ‘strang und durm’ that precedes it. The fact they name this villain Greene actually mars the first film because while before Mr White felt like a cute affectation, now it feels part of some kitschy reprise of older, less successful Bond villains. And if you’re going to incorporate a more mysterious, global spanning organisation, why burden it with an ostensibly pedestrian motivation about water. It’s like they took the more grounded approach of Casino and drove it right into the earth.
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