Quantum of Solace - movie review

The 22nd Bond picture is the shortest yet, but feels like one of the longest.
About an hour in, I began to feel something I haven't for quite a few years in a Bond film - bored.
That's because the script makes very little sense.

The script makes such huge leaps of geography and motivation that whole scenes of exposition must have been left on the cuttingroom floor. The resulting film is as meaningless as its title.
If we don't marvel at Bond's ability to extract the information he needs, and he becomes just a running, chasing, killing machine, that removes a large part of why he's attractive.
Daniel Craig looks extremely cool, and he has always been a strong actor, but he's never able to show us the depth he did in Casino Royale.
In his second outing as 007, he sets about using his licence to kill, in no uncertain manner. So set is he on vengeance that he makes Rambo look like a pussycat.
That monotony of callousness may be very modern, but it's the reason Timothy Dalton never quite worked as Bond - he lacked wit and humour.

Craig showed in Casino Royale that he can play comedy, but he's lost without help from the script.
The gags have gone, along with the gadgets. Wit and fun have deserted the franchise.
The remarkably incoherent plot has Bond chasing the killers of his treacherous lover, Vesper, which leads him to a Bolivian general who wants to be dictator, and a greedy international criminal (Mathieu Amalric, so memorable as the paralysed anti-hero of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) with environmental pretensions, but a secret agenda.
Amalric makes his villain a nasty little rodent of a man, but he's physically unimpressive, and tactically he's clueless.
Bond deserves better adversaries than this.
The only time 007 seems in genuine danger is when M (Judi Dench) gets so cross with him that she cuts off all his credit cards.
There are two Bond girls. Olga Kurylenko, as Camille, and Gemma Arterton, as an MI6 agent, both look great, but neither has much in the way of character. They're instantly forgettable, and the sex is as anodyne as you would expect from the 12A certificate.
The whole thing plays as though the producers are ticking off a list of ingredients.
Mountainside car chase with Bond in an Aston Martin? Check. Rooftop chase? Check. Speedboat chase? Check. Nude girl dead and covered in gunk? Check.
The familiarity of that shopping list might not matter if the sequences were as good as the ones they are imitating, but they aren't.
Director Marc Forster can direct actors, as he proved in Finding Neverland and Monster's Ball, but he was quite the wrong choice to make a Bond film.
He has no flair for action, and commits the same sins that were visible in this week's big chase thriller, Eagle Eye.
He gets in so close with the camera that we don't know what's happening, why, where or to whom. As a result, we stop caring.
Some of the stunts remain impressive, and this picture will do well because of its predecessors. But it's a huge disappointment.