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Men the final moments of Casino Royale, blue-eyed Daniel Craig he has a criminal known as Mr White (Jesper Christensen) at gunpoint on the steps of his Lake Como home. “Name’s Bond,” the spy says softly to his captor. You can also complete the whole sentence.
Despite the intense scrutiny that Craig endured before his release, the 21st entry in the 007 franchise may be the longest-running guarantee of a modern Bond. While previous iterations saw him slowly fade away, all dead over the years, Craig’s debut as a secret agent was praised for being a turning point, returning to the characters he once knew.
The sequel, however, was not so well received. Picking up 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) chooses to support the Bolivian military to control the country’s power, Bond is sent from the rooftops of Siena to the Atacama desert to uncover an impending conspiracy. But in the end, it’s his burning anger over Vesper’s death that fuels his career.
Quantum of Solace was so affected by production problems (the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike forced Craig and director Marc Forster to rewrite large parts of the script) that critics complained about its release, including Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian who wrote that. “(Casino Royale’s) genius charm has been brought down to the mundane”. For a franchise that is known to be more expensive than the usual Hollywood blockbuster price, the negative nature of Quantum seems more suitable for adrenaline-junkie filmmakers like Michael Bay or Paul Greengrass than the British export where it is known. Even former Bond Roger Moore he was embarrassed and the negative style of the film, saying that in 2009 “there was a lot of flash for me”.
From the moment he opens his car through the Apennine mountains, it’s clear that Bond’s coolness from the past has been replaced by an unexpected, but inspired, destruction. The 007 we meet at the beginning of Quantum is a ticking time bomb full of rage, his strong feelings over Vesper’s death only exacerbated by the explosions he often finds himself surrounded by. Forster’s gritty, unflinching cinematography and unflinching editing fit perfectly with this fractured mind, and from the moment Alicia Keys riffs on Bond’s “trigger finger” in the opening theme to another heavy rock, Way to Die, which was originally written as “screechy” and uncharacteristically, it is clear that our hero has accepted his role as an official tool of the government, committed to his work, no matter what.
The macabre side of the franchise appears later in the Bolivian hotel, when one of the Bond Girls films – a green MI6 agent called Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton) – meets his death after being smeared head and finger in black oil, a death similar to that of Jill Masterson in Goldfinger since the world war shows.
At the center of all this chaos is Craig, whose role as a Byronic spy remains unchallenged, guiding us through Bond’s erratic journey no matter how ruthless he becomes. As one of the film’s protagonists, Bolivian intelligence agent Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko), slyly tells him: “There’s something really good about you.”
A similar scene is Greene’s scene at a dramatic dinner in La Paz, where the dimwitted businessman says that “everything (Bond) touches withers and dies” – a comment that is reinforced when one of our hero’s closest allies is killed. Bond’s answer? He is slowly buttoning up his suit to hide the red blood stains on his bright linen shirt. one that has long eluded escapist fiction like 007. If only other canon films were 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 is also available to stream on Netflix in the US. Find out more about what you can follow in Australia here
