by Joe Murray

Created on: December 02, 2008   Last Updated: December 04, 2008

There are three things I ask of the movies: Don't bore me, don't treat me like a twelve-year old and jump the shark, and if you can't deliver quality, at least have a heart.

In the opening frames of "Quantum of Solace" the camera sweeps across the blue waters of a sea, somewhere, pushing in on an ancient covered highway, impatient to discover the action. And when it gets there, MAN! does it not disappoint!

No sooner does the camera find the highway than we are on a pulse-pounding demolition derby down the Viale Italico, the bad guys chasing Bond's bullet-proof Aston Martin in an anonymous black sedan spitting machine gun fire. The Aston roars up the two-lane highway weaving precariously through the two-way traffic causing a passenger car to collide head-on with a truck. Bond's car, briefly impaled on a truck's fender guard, is eventually wrenched away tearing off the Aston's door which skitters away into traffic. More machine gun fire. Another civvie car flies off the embankment into the Tyrrhenian. Then the police join chase but are quickly dispatched by a salad of machine gun fire into the radiator. Suffice to say that we are well beyond a fender-bender moment for Bond's $200,000 ride.

"Quantum of Solace" also nicely follows the no-shark-jumped clause of our non-verbal pact with the movies, unlike others with more potential. "300," despite its august history, suffered from the most sophomoric dialogue outside of an Ed Wood film. And "Beowulf," despite the original material, painted with a sledgehammer instead of a brush, never escaping the shock-and-awe histrionics so beloved by the bubblegum set. These are BAD movies. I mean, even Quentin Tarantino GETS IT. If you're going for the groin, at least don't inflict us with comic book dialogue to get there.

"Quantum" director Marc Forster does neither. This is a film so economical in purchase that you have to pay attention to it and figure it out later, rather like one of those art house ciphers of the '60s and '70s that took a post-film confab in the local coffee house to suss out. ('Who were the guys shooting at Bond?' And 'Who was the guy in the trunk?') Writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade play it close to the vest, preferring to show rather than explain. Haggis, collaborator on consistently superb screenplays ("In the Valley of Elah" and "Letters from Iwo Jima"), has developed a common language with co-writers Purvis and Wade on three previous Bond outings ("The World is Not Enough," "Die Another

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>