In defence of Quan­tum of Solace

Look­ing back at Quan­tum of Solace, it’s clear that it nev­er real­ly stood much of chance. Marc Forster, the jour­ney­man direc­tor behind Find­ing Nev­er­land and Stranger Than Fic­tion, seemed like an odd choice to helm the 22^nd James Bond adven­ture. The film’s poten­tial was damp­ened fur­ther when pro­duc­tion was crip­pled by the 2007 – 2008 writ­ers’ strike, forc­ing Daniel Craig to pol­ish the dia­logue him­self once shoot­ing had already start­ed. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, the final prod­uct was met with a less than enthu­si­as­tic response. ​“Don’t ever let this hap­pen again to James Bond,” cried crit­ic Roger Ebert. ​“What the hell was going on?” asked Roger Moore.

In the years since its release, Quan­tum of Solace has been unremit­ting­ly maligned by Bond fans and non-fans alike, with Rolling Stone, Indiewire and Screen­Rant all rank­ing it among the weak­er efforts from the series’ 50-year his­to­ry. It’s easy to under­stand why the film faces such deri­sion. Arriv­ing hot on the tails of Casi­no Royale – arguably the best James Bond film since the 1960s – the film came up against lofty expec­ta­tions, most of which were quick­ly dashed. The title, for a start, was a bizarre choice, tak­en from an Ian Flem­ing short sto­ry which is mean­ing­less in the con­text of the film. More cru­cial­ly, the action is dis­joint­ed and incom­pre­hen­si­ble, the pac­ing is devoid of all rhyme or rhythm, and the plot­ting is often incoherent.

Near­ly a decade lat­er, and all of these crit­i­cisms still stand up. But despite its fail­ings, Quan­tum of Solace now feels like a bold­er film than it is often giv­en cred­it for, par­tic­u­lar­ly in light of the two most recent entries in the fran­chise, Sky­fall and Spec­tre. Where these films have large­ly revert­ed to type and smoth­ered them­selves in homages to old­er films, Quan­tum stayed true to the revi­talised spir­it estab­lished in Casi­no Royale. It was a dark­er, more real­is­tic Bond which cap­tured the ethos of Fleming’s orig­i­nal nov­els and placed his hero firm­ly with­in post‑9/​11 sen­si­bil­i­ties. Its exe­cu­tion might not have been flaw­less, but it was its own beast which nev­er drift­ed towards the tired tropes and six­ties nos­tal­gia which have since crept back into the Craig era.

Cen­tral to all of this is Daniel Craig’s per­for­mance. His inter­pre­ta­tion of Bond in Quan­tum of Solace feels as though torn direct­ly from the pages of Fleming’s nov­els – a cold­ly cyn­i­cal alco­holic with hedo­nis­tic tastes and lit­tle to live for. Craig is a very dif­fer­ent actor to Roger Moore or Pierce Bros­nan, and the script recog­nis­es this fact. He isn’t forced to deliv­er awk­ward dou­ble enten­dres for laughs; rather, he imbues the char­ac­ter with a mea­sure of irony which per­fect­ly com­ple­ments the tone of the film. It makes for a deep­er and more round­ed por­tray­al of 007, phras­ing him as an actu­al char­ac­ter rather than a fan­tas­ti­cal caricature.

In this way, Quan­tum of Solace was whol­ly unapolo­getic about dou­bling down on the hard­er tra­jec­to­ry that had been promised when the series reboot­ed itself with Casi­no Royale. There was no attempt to fall back on the quips and gad­gets which plagued the Bros­nan years. After the CGI-infused car crash of Die Anoth­er Day, it felt like audi­ences were final­ly ready for a 007 who bleeds when he’s hurt and doesn’t always look fresh out of a salon.

It’s dif­fi­cult to escape the feel­ing that the Bond films have lost their nerve since then, an impres­sion which becomes pal­pa­ble when con­trast­ing two sim­i­lar sequences from Quan­tum of Solace and Spec­tre. Fol­low­ing a bru­tal fight scene in the for­mer, Bond is forced to impro­vise a ban­dage for his slashed bicep, gri­mac­ing as he stems the bleed­ing. It’s a sub­tle moment which ham­mers home the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty beneath Bond’s fear­some exte­ri­or. Com­pare this with the after­math of a sim­i­lar­ly bru­tal fisticuffs in Spec­tre, in which Bond is near­ly killed by Dave Bautista’s Mr Hinx. With­in moments of defeat­ing his oppo­nent, Bond begins mak­ing pas­sion­ate love to his female com­pan­ion, his face and body appar­ent­ly unscarred – a minor dif­fer­ence which nev­er­the­less under­scores a declin­ing sense of dan­ger and prop­er con­se­quence in more recent Bond films.

Quantum’s down-to-earth atmos­phere wasn’t only found in the film’s greater bru­tal­i­ty, but the cen­tral plot also tried to root itself more thor­ough­ly with­in the real world. The sto­ry­line finds Bond in a polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble Bolivia as he unearths a con­spir­a­cy to con­trol and extort the country’s water sup­ply. It’s a believ­able propo­si­tion which plays on con­tem­po­rary con­cerns around the envi­ron­ment and West­ern inter­fer­ence in the devel­op­ing world. The per­pe­tra­tors of the scheme, mem­bers of the mys­te­ri­ous Quan­tum organ­i­sa­tion, were a log­i­cal update of the apo­lit­i­cal SPEC­TRE vil­lains with whom Bond had done bat­tle dur­ing the 1960s. This was not an entire­ly cre­ative deci­sion – the Bond pro­duc­ers only won the rights to use SPEC­TRE and its leader, Blofeld, in Novem­ber 2013 – but nev­er­the­less sug­gests a fran­chise will­ing to adapt itself to a chang­ing world.

The fact that sub­se­quent films have dropped all men­tion of Quan­tum in favour of a straight revival of SPEC­TRE only speaks to their cre­ative timid­i­ty. Rather than expand and explore this new col­lec­tion of ene­mies, they have sim­ply resur­faced the hal­lowed ground of Cold War-era Bond, with­out care for the con­text in which those clas­sic sto­ries exist­ed. Worse, aban­don­ing the con­cept of Quan­tum was an implic­it acknowl­edg­ment that any new ideas they had were nev­er going to be as good as the stuff they already used decades ago.

The gen­er­al lack of nos­tal­gia in Quan­tum of Solace is per­haps its great­est suc­cess, an impres­sion which has only become obvi­ous with the sub­se­quent direc­tion of the fran­chise. More recent efforts have lit­tered them­selves with ref­er­ences to pre­vi­ous films and char­ac­ters, includ­ing the return of Q, Mon­eypen­ny, Blofeld, SPEC­TRE, and an inex­plic­a­bly gad­get-laden Aston Mar­tin DB5. With Quan­tum, all of these ele­ments are refresh­ing­ly absent, yet the film is able to retain a clear under­stand­ing of the icon­ic Bond char­ac­ter. A won­der­ful exam­ple is a scene in which Bond demands to be relo­cat­ed to a high­er-class hotel, despite his cov­er sto­ry of being a low­ly teacher on sab­bat­i­cal: ​“We have just won the lot­tery”, he explains to the concierge. This one moment of Bon­di­an cool is more effec­tive than any of the deriv­a­tive fan ser­vice found in more recent films.

Admit­ted­ly, the larg­er-than-life clich­es of Bond’s world are part of the rea­son why the fran­chise is so endur­ing, but they have too often become sub­sti­tute for gen­uine­ly orig­i­nal ideas, leav­ing much of the Craig era bereft of its own iconog­ra­phy. It’s not just Bond which has been guilty of this – in today’s age of sequel fever and expand­ed cin­e­mat­ic uni­vers­es, there’s been a scourge of mass-mar­ket nos­tal­gia across mod­ern block­buster film­mak­ing, from Star Wars to Juras­sic World. Despite its tech­ni­cal inad­e­qua­cy, Quan­tum of Solace under­stood that a self-aware wink to the audi­ence is no sur­ro­gate for prop­er sub­stance, and thus made a brave effort to sketch out a new direc­tion in which to take Craig’s Bond.

Quan­tum of Solace may lack the pol­ish of Daniel Craig’s oth­er Bonds – you can see what’s going on in them, for a start – but any­one who pro­claims it to be the ​“worst Bond film ever” needs to rewatch Dia­monds Are For­ev­er and have a seri­ous word with them­selves. Cru­cial­ly, the team behind the Bond fran­chise appear to have learned the wrong lessons when respond­ing to Quantum’s luke­warm recep­tion. It was a film which was wound­ed, almost fatal­ly, by unfor­tu­nate cir­cum­stance and a direc­tor ill-equipped to han­dle action set pieces on such a large scale. Nev­er­the­less, its foun­da­tion was a sol­id one, with myr­i­ad poten­tial for future devel­op­ment. As Craig pre­pares to don the icon­ic din­ner jack­et for a fifth and final time in 2019, he could do worse than take inspi­ra­tion from his infa­mous sec­ond outing.