HorrorSpeak---Terror Awaits You in Every Forum!!!!: Quantum of Solace

I wrote a nice in-depth review but then my internet died and it all went away so this will be a slightly abridged version

***POTENTIAL SPOILERS***

After a few days of thinking about it, I'd have to say that my biggest complaint with Quantum were the action scenes. Looking past the fact that James Bond isn't supposed to be an action hero, all the action sequences were cut in such a way as to make them blurry and almost incomprehensible. I mean it was bad enough that the camera would cut to a different angle every 4-5 seconds while Bond was having a conversation with someone but on all the chase or fighting scenes the shots were cut every 1-2 seconds. There just wasn't nearly enough time to take things in before you were shown something dramatically different. It almost looked like I was watching a slideshow; bad guys shooting at Bond, close-up on Bond's face, back to bad guys shooting at Bond, close-up of Bond as he turns a wheel, bad guys explode.

That's not really even that much of an exaggeration. During the plance chase Bond is being shot at by a fighter plane, he turns the wheel a little, and now all of a sudden the fighter plane is underneart him. Next thing you know he turns the wheel again and suddenly the fighter plane crashes into a mountain. Me and everyone I was sitting next to were all wondering "how the hell did that happen?!"

I also found it kind of funny that while Craig was trying to make a more realistic, vulnerable Bond, the action scenes made him look like superman. In Casino Royale, he got cut with a machete, shot with a nail gun, nearly died from poison, and was captured and tortured. He barely survived these encounters and even had to be saved by someone else in many of them. In Quantum, he's taking out fighter planes and helicopters with a junker of a cargo ship, blowing up speed boats left and right, and killing dozens of other people with ease. Not since Rambo have I seen someone score such a high body count in such a diverse number of ways.

Gone is the wit and charm of Bond as well. When he bedded that one girl for example, the extent of his seduction was basically "come into the bedroom and have sex with me." Craig is definitely one of the best at being Bond so it's a shame that he was barely given anything to work with.

My other big bone of contention is with the overall plot. While they had an interesting idea and could have done a lot with it, the finished product just felt kind of dull. We're exposed to this super-secret organization that is trying to control the world and their dastardly plot is to charge the Bolivian people double what they're currently paying for water? Oh no! When I saw the first previews with Greene talking about the most valuable resource in the world I thought that they had discovered some sort of super valuable and rare material that could be used to unbalance the world. But no...it was good old H2O all along.

One final point I would like to make is that if you yourself saw Quantum and liked it, more power to you. I've liked plenty of movies that other people didn't so to each their own. If it wasn't for varying movie tastes we'd have an extremely dull world of cinema