Quantum of Solace - Review

He's back. Daniel Craig allays any fear that he was just a one-Martini Bond, with this, his second 007 adventure, the perplexingly named Quantum Of Solace.

I've got to admit that this didn't excite me as much as Casino Royale and the villain is especially underpowered. But Craig personally has the chops, as they say in Hollywood. He's made the part his own, every inch the coolly ruthless agent-cum-killer, nursing a broken heart and coldly suppressed rage. If the Savile Row suit with the Beretta shoulder holster fits, wear it. And he's wearing it.

This is a crash-bang Bond, high on action, low on quips, long on location glamour, short on product placement.

Under the direction of Marc Forster, the movie ladles out the adrenalin in a string of deafening episodes: car chases, plane wrecks, motor boat collisions. If it's got an engine, and runs on fuel, and can crash into another similarly powered vehicle, with Bond at the wheel, and preferably with a delicious female companion in the passenger seat - well, it goes in the movie.

There are plenty of references to other Bond moments. A horribly dangerous skydive recalls The Spy Who Loved Me. A pile-up in Haiti which spills a macabre lorryload of coffins recalls the voodoo creepiness of Live And Let Die. And, most outrageously of all, the grotesque daubing of a female corpse brings back Goldfinger - though Sean Connery got an awful lot more mileage out of that sort of thing.

As in Casino Royale, the famous John Barry theme tune is saved up until the end; a baffling, decision, I always think, not to use this thrilling music at the beginning of the film.

Bond has hardly got his 007 spurs, when he's infuriating M, Judi Dench, with his insolence and insubordination. Out in the field, he's whacking enemy agents in short, sharp, bone-cracking bursts of violence when he should be bringing them in for questioning.

In theory, he is out to nail a sinister international business type: Dominic Greene, played by French star Mathieu Amalric, who under a spurious ecological cover plans to buy up swaths of South American desert and a portfolio of Latin American governments to control the water supply of an entire continent. As Greene, Amalric has the maddest eyes, creepiest leer, and dodgiest teeth imaginable.

Clearly, Bond has to take this fellow down. But he also wants to track down the man who took his beloved Vesper away from him in the previous movie: he is pathologically seeking payback, and to the fury of his superiors, this is getting personal. But it hasn't stopped him cultivating female company in the traditional, fantastically supercilious manner. His companions are as demurely submissive as ever. Olga Kurylenko plays Camille, a mysterious, smouldering figure, out to wreak vengeance on the corrupt Bolivian dictators who killed her family.

Britain's Gemma Arterton plays Agent Fields; she greets 007 wearing a trenchcoat with apparently little underneath, like some sort of MI6 strippogram. And she is the recipient of his ardour in the luxury hotel suite - that quintessential Bond habitat. This movie is, in fact, a reminder of how vital hotels are in Bond films, providing the essential narrative grammar: the checking in, the fight with the stranger in the room, the messages left at reception, the luxury cars lovingly photographed outside.

I was disappointed there was so little dialogue, flirtation and characterisation in this Bond: Forster and his writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade clearly thought this sort of sissy nonsense has to be cut out in favour of explosions. Well, perhaps that is what Bond fans want (not this Bond fan, though). But I was also baffled that relatively little was made of the deliciously villainous Amalric: especially the final encounter.

But set against this is the cool, cruel presence of Craig - his lips perpetually semi-pursed, as if savouring some new nastiness his opponents intend to dish out to him, and the nastiness he intends to dish out in return. This film, unlike the last, doesn't show him in his powder-blue swimming trunks (the least heterosexual image in 007 history), but it's a very physical performance. Quantum of Solace isn't as good as Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig's Bond debut has been toned down in favour of conventional action. But the man himself powers this movie; he carries the film: it's an indefinably difficult task for an actor. Craig measures up.

The Invasion - Review

Even after 50 years and three movie adaptations, Jack Finney’s short story “The Body Snatchers” is still irresistible fodder for anyone wanting to make a political statement in the guise of creepy aliens. Even those who don’t remember the Cold War/Red Scare paranoia of 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or the Nixonian anti-government fear of the 1970’s film of the same name, are familiar with pod people, alien beings that attack and replace humans in order to completely restructure the human race.

With this summer’s The Invasion, the times have changed a bit, and not remotely for the better. Pod people have become gelatinous cellular alien blob somethings, and instead of killing humans and growing exact replicas in pods in the backyard, they change the host human’s DNA from the inside as they sleep, leaving that person to wake up looking exactly the same, but working for the alien agenda. Despite adhering to many of the details of the original two films, right down to the characters’ names, all attempts to update this property and give it real-life meaning fall completely flat thanks to a meandering plot and an overwhelming lack of vision.

Nicole Kidman plays our persistently human heroine Carol Bennell, with Daniel Craig as her sidekick and love interest. Craig is a doctor who, along with a lab assistant played by Jeffrey Wright, helps Carol wise up to the fact that everyone around them has become emotionless automatons, working tirelessly to transform all remaining humans by (in a disgusting touch) vomiting alien goo into their mouths. Carol soon realizes that her son Oliver—off for the weekend with the new, alien version of his father—is not only in danger of being alien-ized, but may possess the immunity to the alien virus necessary to reverse its effects. And so the chase begins.

Reports say that director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s original cut of the film was further edited and re-shot by the Wachowski Brothers (of The Matrix fame), which might explain the completely disjointed message The Invasion is sending us. The “pod people” concept has always made a great allegory, but this time no one can seem to decide what they want to say. There’s an obvious message about falling “asleep” and waking up not caring about anything or anyone, a slap on the wrist to a culture perfectly willing to ignore current strife. At the same time, the aliens’ lack of emotion results in the end of wars—real wars, like Iraq and Darfur—repeatedly shown via CNN reports. Carol clearly believes that humanity is worth saving regardless, but how about the Iraqi citizens who just achieved peace at the small cost of a few strands of alien DNA? It seems insane for any director to let us root for the aliens, but when it’s the lives of millions of real Sudanese vs. Nicole Kidman and her low-rent Haley Joel Osment son, the choice is easy.

All of the pseudo-intellectual posturing and mixed messages would be tolerable were the film not so damn slow. The main characters spend forever figuring out what the audiences knows within the first minutes of the film, and the last 45 minutes are stuffed with car chases, set-piece explosions and relentlessly-flashy editing that substitute for actual suspense. Because these pod people don’t actually kill their victims, just alter them, they’re not nearly as threatening as they ought to be; a twist thrown in at the end that threatens Oliver’s life simply doesn’t matter so late in the game.

Kidman does her best in an action hero role, but casting her as the only human in a world full of emotionless aliens is almost a joke. She’s one of the most expressionless actresses out there, and is far better at imitating the aliens—as she must do to walk safely among them—than being a real person. Craig does better, miraculously pulling off the “ignored best friend love interest” role despite the James Bond lurking within him, but never gets the attention he deserves.

Despite a classic premise, some talented actors and a few good ideas,

The Invasion is a snore-inducing mess. Though we look to the 50’s and 70’s versions of this story for insights into our national identity at the time, I can’t imagine The Invasion will even be remembered at all. At least, I hope not.