Quantum of Solace Reviews

[adam]

Maybe they will put Bond in DAF or O moad. Strolling around in a tux making quips, one liners and innuendo's. Who needs Connery or Moore ? !

[adam]

'I'm just popping out for some fresh air darling'

'That should keep you in curry for a few weeks'

[alex]

I'm sure the greatest thespian of our times would love a couple of lines like that.

[bondsghost]

Sure, why not. After all he does so well with them.
She's Sea Sick
I can't seem to find the stationery. Can you help me?

[skywalker]

Dec 18, 2008 13:12:11 GMT -5 bondsghost said:

Sure, why not. After all he does so well with them.
She's Sea Sick
I can't seem to find the stationery. Can you help me?

That comment sums up the franchise for me. Not good enough and not Bond.

[Greg Haugen]

Not exactly Oscar Wilde.

[alvin]

I got the special edition of QOS and it's unbelievable. I had to buy both blu-ray and standard DVD just to have a back up in case of an accident. My friends and I watched the blu-ray at my friend Maynard's house. He has a 50" plasma and we were blown away by the experience. In fact, we first watched CR and then we watched QOS. I can tell you it was a deeply moving experience, you realize that these two movies were meant to be watched back-to-back. I started to get tears in my eyes, and I can tell you every body was deeply moved. This is truly a masterpiece. We kept high-fiving each other during the action scenes. THe opera scene is still my favorite. I have the DVD player in my bedroom playing it in a loop while I study. It's just unbelievable.

The second disc has the documentaries. The longest one is "Bond on Location." This one shows how they made Panama look like Haiti and Bolivia. My favorite is the one for Marc Forster, it's about 3 minutes long but it's an emotional showstopper. It makes you realize that Marc Forster is a true artist and he has deep integrity in his vision for QOS.

[harrypalmer]

Apr 2, 2009 15:01:40 GMT -5 alvin said:

I got the special edition of QOS and it's unbelievable. I had to buy both blu-ray and standard DVD just to have a back up in case of an accident. My friends and I watched the blu-ray at my friend Maynard's house. He has a 50" plasma and we were blown away by the experience. In fact, we first watched CR and then we watched QOS. I can tell you it was a deeply moving experience, you realize that these two movies were meant to be watched back-to-back. I started to get tears in my eyes, and I can tell you every body was deeply moved. This is truly a masterpiece. We kept high-fiving each other during the action scenes. THe opera scene is still my favorite. I have the DVD player in my bedroom playing it in a loop while I study. It's just unbelievable.

The second disc has the documentaries. The longest one is "Bond on Location." This one shows how they made Panama look like Haiti and Bolivia. My favorite is the one for Marc Forster, it's about 3 minutes long but it's an emotional showstopper. It makes you realize that Marc Forster is a true artist and he has deep integrity in his vision for QOS.

The 1st Casino Royale DVD was a bit mean with the extras (from what I heard - I did not buy a copy). It looks like the QOS DVD is a bit more generous.

I'm going to borrow FormerBondfan's copy.

[bjameso]

Foster already says he's gonna put out another edition of QOS
he says this edition was rushed and he didnt get everything on the special edition dvd and blu ray he wanted

[Gambit]

Apr 3, 2009 10:50:35 GMT -5 bjameso said:

Foster already says he's gonna put out another edition of QOS
he says this edition was rushed and he didnt get everything on the special edition dvd and blu ray he wanted

They usually release 67 different versions to take advantage of completist fans. At least I'm saving money with Bond now. I have no desire to buy or own the current films.

[FormerBondFan]

Apr 6, 2009 9:48:55 GMT -5 Gambit said:

I have no desire to buy or own the current films.

Same here.

[atticus]

When Daniel Craig dumps Mathis' body in a garbage bin in an alley, I took that as some kind of psychological cry from Eon that they have this perverse self-hatred for the series, like they want to put it all into the dumpster. You got to hand it to them, Quantum Of Solace and Daniel Craig are pure trash. "I'd rather stay in a morgue," so says Daniel Craig somewhere in the film (I can't even remember the precise scene because everything about the movie is forgettable). I remember that the audience I saw this movie with didn't know whether to interpret that line as a Bondian quip, so nobody laughed. Then a guy seated about three rows in front of me finally blurted out, "This is stupid." Then a big crowd laughed. I think they were all disgusted with the film, probably feeling that they were all trapped in a morgue.

Eon bombards us with quick-cut edits and fast pacing as if they don't want to bother presenting us with a good action narrative, or they think we're too stupid to comprehend anything, so they just throw the action at us and blatantly copy Bourne. But then they go out of their way to be sly by inserting crude anti-American attitudes. Yeah, they throw in that obligatory angry Leftist politics of Hollywood. The CIA is presented as Hollywood's demented perception of America as corrupt and greedily fixated on petroleum, and the marginalized group we need to feel sorry for are poor Bolvian villagers whose water supply get cut off. Why the Bond series has to go in this Hollywood Leftist direction is beyond me. I take it this is Barbara Broccoli's attempt at coddling to that empire in Southern California, and Michael G. Wilson, now a dopey old man, just follows along like a puppy. But it gets worse. When Dominic Greene receives euros instead of dollars, one villain says something like, "the dollar isn't what it used to be." Well, looking back to last November, the movie premiered on a day when the dollar was the strongest that it's been since at least 2003 against the euro and the British pound. This just underscores the carelessness of Eon for putting in a line that derides the greenback; and why on earth would they put in an anti-American slant? It doesn't exactly encourage repeat viewings from American movie-goers, which obviously happened because the movie consistently declined in box-office revenues in the succeeding weeks of its release.

All the villains are boring. Not once do you feel any threat from them. And why Eon is obsessed with hinting that they're a bunch of gay guys without delving into such characterizations, is beyond me. In the books, Fleming does occassionally deal with homosexual villains, but they're presented as menacing characters with interesting psychological aspects. But in Quantum Of Solace, they're just a bunch of guys in tuxedos who look like they work in the fashion industry. So we get no threat in this supposedly dark action thriller, no strong conflict between the villain and the alleged Bond. Speaking of which...Craig finally fulfills what he started in that atrocity called Casino Royale. Here he comes full circle not as Bond but as the Bond Girl. That's right...now that Eon has embraced the Leftist culture in Hollywood, they had to make the screen Bond into some kind of woman. We got to see Craig like a Bond girl in CR, popping out of the water like Ursula Andress and Hallie Berry, with his nipples wet and glistening, as if Eon wanted him to look like a woman. Then they stripped him of that devil-may-care bedhopping playboy personality that used to be one of the iconic things about the character. In Quantum Of Solace, Eon completed his evolution by making him wear those friggin' tight shirts and taking in all those bizarre stares from Dominic Greene and that one gay henchman with the bowl haircut. Then, to make matters worse, Eon makes Craig flaunt those friggin' nipples again in that useless love scene with that young actress, who by the way reminds me of a transvestite. There's something about her hair and that trench coat she wears. I thought she was a guy and would remove that trench coat and show us that he's a Cher impersonator. This lone love scene is a joke, like the rest of the film.

I'll say it again: this is a Bond film for the Hollywood Leftist culture. But as the 22nd film in the series, think of it as the Matrix 2 in the way it let the fans down.

[Gambit]

(Sorry, lost the link for this)

by steffanileman | April 4, 2009 at 03:03 pm

I grew up with Bond movies. Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, and Roger Moore fuelled my teenage and post-teenage fantasies of a fun, exciting, glorious and meaningful life. What could have been more gratifying than a license to kill the bad guys and to fornicate with beautiful women on Her Majesty’s Service with a government expense account?

I didn’t understand why Broccoli dumped Lazenby and Dalton, two of my favourites, but then Albert Broccoli was as fussy about his Bonds as I am about my vegetables and two cups of coffee; I don’t drink Starbucks roast and I love broccoli. He retired Pierce Brosnan, I thought, for his poor bed performance in The Thomas Crown Affair and Rene Russo’s compassionate smile. If you’re a woman you just can’t look at a Bond man with anything less than pleading admiration.

I rarely see a movie twice, but I must have seen each Bond movie at least twenty times. The theme song of “You Only Live Twice” still rings in my ears, yes that’s my song.

Then comes Daniel Craig with Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.

Craig reminds me of the concierge at LAX Hilton, he looks pissed off most of the time anticipating a bad tip. “I didn’t choose this job, it chose me” says his face. You don’t want to risk tipping this guy. Thank you very much, it’s a small bag, I can manage it myself.
I was kind of disappointed with Casino Royale, but there was enough suspense and Eva Green, the stunning actress with emerald eyes, who carried the whole movie and mesmerised the audience to a shocking anti-climax. This woman can be more French than Catherine Deneuve and more English than the most Anglo BBC anchor. Even Bond, the incurable bachelor, fell in love with her and decided to retire and raise a family with her, but Eva understandably preferred to drown herself.

Quantum of Solace starts with a routine car chase. The Carabinieri, Italy’s finest, are firing at Bond. I guess I was about to figure out why when my brother says “Come on, you couldn’t possibly be sleeping, this is a Bond movie, James Bond, wake up!” Huh, snort , snort, whose car tumbled down the hill? Is James Bond dead?

Next we are transported from Italy to Haiti, presumably courtesy of British Airways. Who’s the chambermaid, snort? And I can hardly keep my eyes open. Sorry, she turns out to be the heroine, the one James Bond is supposed to, you know. They’re driving in a yellow VW bug, just like my first baby, when the heroine pulls a gun on Bond and tries to kill him, and I don’t blame her. Bond jumps out of the car and runs. This is so wise. If a woman pulls a gun on you, just run. Don’t stand around and argue.

Then we see Bond waiting on a scooter behind vegetable crates, and he’s not looking for turnips or tomatoes. There’s a tiny bit of suspense here, what in the quantum world of sub-atomic motorcycles is 007 waiting for? He’s waiting for the heroine to get on the bad guy’s boat so he can rescue her on the high seas, there’s no point in rescuing her on the quay. As soon as the boat leaves he flies his scooter into a barge and walks over the other barges to save the lead lady from the bad guys in the boat. That’s a cheap, low–budget stunt, Broccoli. I could have done that myself without going on Weight Watchers.

Where’s Q with his exploding gadgets? How can you have a Bond movie without Q and the Bond car?

At nightfall Bond gets chased by two bad cops on motorcycles and the body of his friend is discovered in his trunk. After fixing the bad cops Bond dumps the body in the garbage bin. “It doesn’t matter to him now” he says. Maybe they do that in England, but thank heavens garbage collection and funeral services are regulated in British Columbia, it couldn’t happen here.
What’s the plot and who’s the bad guy? I ask my brother between snorts. He says it has something to do with spitting lamas and poor, barefooted, thirsty Bolivian natives. The tired-looking nice chap that looks like your friendly cashier at Safeway turns out to be the arch villain. He’s out to steal not Bolivia’s oil as we were led to suspect, but those poor peasants’ precious water. Come on, even the baddest villain wouldn’t do that. Oh Broccoli, what a dumb script this is. Have we run out of villains and evil in this world? Why can’t your crook rob Wall Street, Bill Gates, or Steve Wozniak so he’d stop dancing?

Finally the bad and the good guys come together for Armageddon at a super modern luxury hotel in the middle of the Bolivian desert, presumably built for people that love to watch snakes and vultures. This is the ultimate vacation resort for the American Tourist that has been everywhere including the North Pole and Galapagos Islands. The Generalissimo of Bolivia is a jovial, kind looking man with a bushy moustache. He reminds me of my late uncle until he starts raping the waitress. Come on, Broccoli, a bottle of Viagra wouldn’t work on this guy.

Next he jumps on our heroine with dishonourable intentions when a really pissed off Bond drops in through the roof. Chop, chop, and another chop, and the Generalissimo is mercifully saved from his pending heart attack and dispatched to Valhalla. We can’t figure out why the rooms of the luxury desert resort are exploding one by one, too much gas in the water maybe, but alas, Bond and Bondie are ultimately exploded to the safety of the desert.

I decide to wake up when Bond and our heroine kiss in the car at long last. There’s nothing like some sweaty, sizzling desert romance and sex to save a movie, as they say. Then the heroine jumps out of the car with a disgusted look on her face and walks away, and I can tell it’s not Bond’s antiperspirant. She’d rather walk a thousand miles of desert than kiss or drive with this guy, and I can understand why.

I don’t want to give away a truly bad ending, but Bond decides to let nature kill our friendly cashier for having failed to convince anybody in the audience and the cast that he’s a bad guy. Nobody except Bond took the poor chap seriously. All he did was to buy some water for cash from a corrupt official, like many good business people do nowadays, and bribery is not a capital crime anywhere except China. He drives the guy to the middle of the desert and hands him what I think is a can of beer, possibly Guinness Ale, and says “I wouldn’t drink this for at least 10 hours if I were you.” How gracious can you get? But wait a minute, I was wrong, it wasn’t Guinness or Fosters Ale, and you’d never guess what was in the can.

In the final scene M, nowadays stands for Bond’s Mother Superior, announces to Bond that the bad guy was discovered dead in the middle of the desert. Since the no-fly zone and Saddam are gone, Britain’s elite SAS commandos must now be patrolling the Bolivian desert looking for dead bodies. “Was there anything beside him?” asks Bond. “Yes, there was an empty can of motor oil.” Yuk, if he drank that stuff they would’ve found more than just an empty can beside him. “We’re now trying to find out if it was Pennzoil or a generic brand. Apparently he was overdue for a tune-up and died of natural causes”. The latter part is my pro bono suggestion for an even better alternate ending.

Even Judi Dench can’t save this movie, but she can certainly sanitize it for you folks that believe in the sanctity of justice under the law.

Mr. Broccoli, if you want to hire me for the next flick, I’m available, able and willing.

[chuck007]

Apr 21, 2009 12:33:13 GMT -5 atticus said:

When Daniel Craig dumps Mathis' body in a garbage bin in an alley, I took that as some kind of psychological cry from Eon that they have this perverse self-hatred for the series, like they want to put it all into the dumpster. You got to hand it to them, Quantum Of Solace and Daniel Craig are pure trash. "I'd rather stay in a morgue," so says Daniel Craig somewhere in the film (I can't even remember the precise scene because everything about the movie is forgettable). I remember that the audience I saw this movie with didn't know whether to interpret that line as a Bondian quip, so nobody laughed. Then a guy seated about three rows in front of me finally blurted out, "This is stupid." Then a big crowd laughed. I think they were all disgusted with the film, probably feeling that they were all trapped in a morgue.

Eon bombards us with quick-cut edits and fast pacing as if they don't want to bother presenting us with a good action narrative, or they think we're too stupid to comprehend anything, so they just throw the action at us and blatantly copy Bourne. But then they go out of their way to be sly by inserting crude anti-American attitudes. Yeah, they throw in that obligatory angry Leftist politics of Hollywood. The CIA is presented as Hollywood's demented perception of America as corrupt and greedily fixated on petroleum, and the marginalized group we need to feel sorry for are poor Bolvian villagers whose water supply get cut off. Why the Bond series has to go in this Hollywood Leftist direction is beyond me. I take it this is Barbara Broccoli's attempt at coddling to that empire in Southern California, and Michael G. Wilson, now a dopey old man, just follows along like a puppy. But it gets worse. When Dominic Greene receives euros instead of dollars, one villain says something like, "the dollar isn't what it used to be." Well, looking back to last November, the movie premiered on a day when the dollar was the strongest that it's been since at least 2003 against the euro and the British pound. This just underscores the carelessness of Eon for putting in a line that derides the greenback; and why on earth would they put in an anti-American slant? It doesn't exactly encourage repeat viewings from American movie-goers, which obviously happened because the movie consistently declined in box-office revenues in the succeeding weeks of its release.

All the villains are boring. Not once do you feel any threat from them. And why Eon is obsessed with hinting that they're a bunch of gay guys without delving into such characterizations, is beyond me. In the books, Fleming does occassionally deal with homosexual villains, but they're presented as menacing characters with interesting psychological aspects. But in Quantum Of Solace, they're just a bunch of guys in tuxedos who look like they work in the fashion industry. So we get no threat in this supposedly dark action thriller, no strong conflict between the villain and the alleged Bond. Speaking of which...Craig finally fulfills what he started in that atrocity called Casino Royale. Here he comes full circle not as Bond but as the Bond Girl. That's right...now that Eon has embraced the Leftist culture in Hollywood, they had to make the screen Bond into some kind of woman. We got to see Craig like a Bond girl in CR, popping out of the water like Ursula Andress and Hallie Berry, with his nipples wet and glistening, as if Eon wanted him to look like a woman. Then they stripped him of that devil-may-care bedhopping playboy personality that used to be one of the iconic things about the character. In Quantum Of Solace, Eon completed his evolution by making him wear those friggin' tight shirts and taking in all those bizarre stares from Dominic Greene and that one gay henchman with the bowl haircut. Then, to make matters worse, Eon makes Craig flaunt those friggin' nipples again in that useless love scene with that young actress, who by the way reminds me of a transvestite. There's something about her hair and that trench coat she wears. I thought she was a guy and would remove that trench coat and show us that he's a Cher impersonator. This lone love scene is a joke, like the rest of the film.

I'll say it again: this is a Bond film for the Hollywood Leftist culture. But as the 22nd film in the series, think of it as the Matrix 2 in the way it let the fans down.

sorry grandpa, Roger Moore james bond movies is a joke, Brosnan James bond movies is a spoof ;D

[Cpt. Sir Dominic Flandry]

I can respect those who enjoyed Casino Royale. But did you really enjoy Quantum of Solace, Chuck. You must have been disappointed.

atticus
The CIA is presented as Hollywood's demented perception of America as corrupt and greedily fixated on petroleum

That was the default view of most people around the World; "anti-Americanism was terribly fashionable". Now those people feel Barack Obama will clean up US foreign policy - but it will be rather similar!

The anti-Americanism stemmed from a lack of ideas on the part of Eon. They wanted to make a serious political thriller based on current geo-politics. As a result Barbara and Haggis shoved what they were reading in their progressive media sources into the movie. I have read many reviews, even from those who would call themselves "left-wing", saying that the political aspects of QOS were extremely dull.