Quantum of Solace

I took a little time out of my busy pre-finals weekend to go see the new James Bond movie with a friend from school. In case you wanted a reliable opinion on the film before you go see it, I'll be happy to provide. No spoilers here, so don't worry.

Quantum of Solace starts literally minutes after Casino Royale ends. So if you haven't seen CR yet, I would highly recommend it. Otherwise, you'll be annoying your fellow movie-goers by constantly asking, "Who's that?" or "Why is Vesper important?"

There were some great things about this film, and so terrible things about this film. Let's talk about the terrible first. Most of my complaints in this category revolve around the editing job. If you've seen even one of the Bourne films, you'll know that every single fight sequence is hyper-edited, super fast cuts, and nearly impossible to follow. If you love that, well, my complaints won't be so bad.

I don't know where movie editors and directors got it into their heads that the audience doesn't like to be able to follow a good fight scene, but somewhere they did, and we all have to suffer for it now. Bond has three or four big action scenes, and I'll be darned if I can tell you exactly what happened in any but one of those. Compared to Casino Royale, which was fight-light, this Bond packs a much bigger punch, and puts it right in the mouth... over and over again. And again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you loved the simmering tension of the last film, you'll be missing it here.

Fortunately, there's plenty of the good to make up for QoS's shortcomings. The Opera scene. Not much more needs to be said about that, you'll know when you see it. It was just dang cool. QoS still had the emotional Bond trying to cope with the damage done by Vesper in the last film, and it was good to see him trying to deal with everything else on his plate. I think the writers did a good job working that in without making the film into another Walk to Remember.

The villains were decent, the girls were good, the acting was great. Lots of stuff blew up. All in all, the movie is a solid notch on the Bond Belt. If you're like me and you put Casino Royale as the best of the Bond films, then QoS belongs somewhere not far beneath it. I'd put it right underneath Goldeneye, at a solid number 3 of all time. That may change when I watch it again, and I have a feeling enough critics complained about the editing that they won't make that mistake again.... I hope.