Watched: Quantum of Solace
Observations:
- The good parts first: Mathieu Amalric is brilliantly crazed when put in a corner (the axe-swinging, lord), Olga Kurylenko glowers like a champ, and the character arc between M and James Bond is wonderfully taut.
- Oh - also - the entire sequence with Tosca was great. Wonderfully filmed, very clever, fun as hell to watch.
- This film was a mess. I think it was just about coherent if you found your way through the tangle of accents, but at its peak I think I found about five overlapping subplots.
- About Quantum: am I right in thinking it was only namechecked once? I’m sure that at the rest of the time it’s just referred to as “my organisation”, so to hear it referred to by name at the end is kind of jarring.
- A lot of brown in this film. (See above.)
- I think I still enjoyed this, but with a lot of reservations: there were only a few points that felt genuinely thrilling, and a lot of the conversations felt more like the bits in between car chases than scenes in their own right. Snappy dialogue is kind of key to Bond. You can’t just leave it out.
- Glad I got it out of the way (I’m really only watching this for the sake of continuity; Skyfall’s next), but a long way from the best.