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.

Hitman - Review

An adaptation of the popular videogame of the same name, Hitman is exactly the kind of movie you’d expect it to be. The bad kind. It’s incredible that after all this time Hollywood still hasn’t been able to figure out the videogame to movie genre. Maybe they don’t think they have to since the movies make tons of money anyway, but as a gamer myself it sure would be nice if filmmakers would start taking us seriously. Or perhaps I should say it would be nice if someone hired a serious filmmaker to make one of these movies.

That hasn’t happened yet, and so we’re stuck with videogame movies done by cinematic cellar dwellers like Paul W.S. Anderson, Uwe Boll, and in this case Xavier Gens. He directs Hitman from a script by Skip Woods, a script which doesn’t do him any favors. It’s as shallow and empty as it is convoluted and confusing in telling the story of Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant) a bald, bar-coded killer for hire.

There’s a halfhearted attempt to develop a back story for 47 in the film’s opening credits, but for the most part he leaps on to the screen as is. We never really understand who he is, what he is, or why he does what he does and Gens doesn’t seem to care. I learned more about Olyphant’s hitman character in the film’s trailers than I did during the running time of the movie itself. The trailers talk about 47 as an agent of a disavowed brotherhood of the Catholic Church, and allude to a secret religious conspiracy, all of which seems interesting. None of that is in the movie. Instead, we get a bald guy who we’re told is a member of an “organization” and simply walks around shooting people, without any obvious motivation, and with a life that begins when you enter the theater and ends when you walk out of it. He’s given no history, no personality. 47 is a walking, talking, killing robot and we never get to know him.

Because we don’t know who he is, his actions are often confusing. 47 is on a mission, the mission goes wrong, and a lot of people are trying to kill him. We don’t really know why, and though the film is filled with plot revelations none of them seem to add up to anything. Even after the movie, I’d be hard pressed to tell you what I saw. There was this bald guy, he shot a bunch of people, then he drove away. Interpol is after him, some people he kills, others he lets live for no other reason than that it would make him too unsympathetic to kill one of the good guys. He saves a girl named Nika (Olga Kurylenko) too, because apparently he has a thing for facial tattoos, and because the movie needed a way to work in some gratuitous nudity. At least it’s good gratuitous nudity. Olga Kurylenko is built like a gazelle.

What I’m getting at here is obvious: Nika’s luscious legs aside, Hitman is an unmitigated mess. The script is a disaster, the plot is a waste of time, and the characters aren’t just unsympathetic, they’re empty, hollow shells which are little better than computer generated constructs. I’m not sure why they bothered with flesh and blood actors.

The movie has one thing going for it and one thing only: It looks pretty. Gens has a real flair for gritty, Euro-trash and the film drips with dark contrasts and long, lingering, gorgeous slow-motion shots littered with bullets. His characters are dressed in dark contrasting colors which really pop on screen, and he makes full use of that, framing each shot carefully and contrasting Olyphant’s shiny bald head with his surroundings.

If only all that great cinematography had been used on some sort of mind-blowing action sequence I might have been able to forgive the film’s muddled mess of a script. But Hitman can’t even accomplish that. Most of the movie’s action boils down to a guy standing and posing with guns. There’s a sword fight between hitmen, but it comes off like a spatula fight. In the face of real action movies like The Bourne Ultimatum and Live Free or Die Hard, Hitman’s action isn’t that exciting. I kept waiting for the film to hit its big, defining moment; kept waiting for that big, penultimate action sequence; kept waiting for the plot to unravel and make sense. It never happened, and I wish Hitman hadn’t either.