Quantum of Solace

Daniel Craig’s second outing as James Bond is as frustrating, sloppy and brusque as its predecessor was engaging, sleek and unhurried. At 106 minutes, it’s the shortest of the Bond films, but it feels like one of the longest as it bounces hither and yon only to wind up stranded in a Bolivian desert, where baddie Dominic Greene (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s Mathieu Amalric) is sucking the sand dry of its underwater river. Yawn. Used to be, Bond villains were larger-than-life Evil Geniuses who at least had Grand Aspirations to take over the world, bwah-haw-haw; now, the bad guy’s just a phony environmentalist with a thing for deposed dictators and dry wells. At least that’s what Quantum of Solace seems to be about, though it’s simply too hard to tell—or too pointless to care about—courtesy the haphazard direction of Marc Forster (Finding Neverland), who demonstrates by negative example why Bond movies are best served by journeymen with something to prove rather than would-be A-listers slumming it. From its very first moments—we enter the film mid-car chase—Quantum is a spastic, indecipherable, unholy, and altogether unwatchable mess. Between swerves and smashes, we’ve simply have no idea who’s doing what to whom, where they’re doing it, or why. What’s meant to be kinetic and cathartic serves only to disorient, to keep the audience at a head-scratching distance. From there, things only gets worse.