QUANTUM OF SOLACE: 3 ½ STARS

In the first five minutes of Quantum of Solace, the twenty-second official James Bond picture and the second to star Daniel Craig in the iconic role, hundreds of bullets are fired, a building is destroyed, a truck totaled and several cars trashed and one blown up in spectacular fashion. By the time the opening credits roll the body count is already in the double digits and any thoughts that first-time Bond director, Mark Monster’s Ball Forster would make a ponderous, slow-moving movie are erased.

The story of Quantum of Solace combines elements of the Jason Bourne movies, Chinatown and, of course Ian Fleming’s novels to create one compelling, but slightly confusing plot line. As we meet Bond (Craig) he is grief stricken from the death of his girlfriend Vesper Lynd. His quest for revenge in her death leads him to Dominic Greene (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s Mathieu Amalric), CEO of Greene Planet, an environmental company that is actually a front for much more nefarious activities (think John Huston’s character in Chinatown only on a massive scale). Bond’s single-minded search brings him into conflict with his biggest ally—M (Judi Dench)—and brings him an unlikely partner (Olga Kurylenko).

Forster does his best to keep the action moving along at a feverish pace. At 106 minutes this is the shortest ever Bond picture and it flies by in a flash of fists and fast edits. There are Bourne style battle scenes—brutal, up-close-and-personal fist fights—wild chases and huge explosions, nothing exactly new for the Bond franchise, but here is where the film is earning its harshest criticism.

Forster sets up the action scenes nicely, and in several cases pulls off some exciting, breathless work, but too often his sense of screen geography gets away from him and the actors get lost amid the shaky, hand held camera work and frenetic fight choreography. Several times I wondered who was punching who and there is an extended plane chase that is a bit too sloppy to be truly exciting. The sheer spectacle of it all will entertain the eye well enough, but the action doesn’t have the high octane bite it could have had.  

Forster is much more at home with the more personal elements of the movie. He keeps the tension in the dangerous character triangle between Bond, his boss M and the villain Dominic as taut as a bowstring. This tension gives us the most conflicted Bond ever.

Torn between his lust for revenge and his duty Bond goes rogue and is more dangerous than ever. Craig, when he’s not performing stunts of daring do—he was injured several times while making the film—is cold, emotionless, a killer who will stop at nothing until his bloodlust is satisfied. This is a much more serious Bond than your father’s 007.

The funny lines and puns of the Moore and Brosnan years have pretty much evaporated, replaced by much darker humor. When M asks Bond about the whereabouts of Mr. Slate, an informant he has just dispatched, he says with no hint of a smile, “Slate was a dead end.” Later M tries to end his killing spree with, “If you could avoid killing every possible lead that would be much appreciated.”      

Quantum of Solace is a tough movie, the good guys do bad things and the bad guys do even worse things, and in the end the morality of right and wrong is left twisting in the wind. 

THE QUEEN: 4 STARS

Queen Elizabeth II has been a constant presence in most of our lives for sixty years, her stern, but comforting face staring up at us from our money and official portraits in government buildings. She talks to us at Christmas and even the Sex Pistols wrote a song about her. But even though she’s been more documented than Paris Hilton in the press, I still never really felt a connection to her. Perhaps it is her regal remoteness, or that she doesn’t show up at award shows or go to nightclubs, that has made her something of an enigma in our celebrity obsessed culture.

A new Stephen Frears movie, The Queen, focuses on a week in September 1997, the time between Princess Diana’s death in Paris and her funeral in London. The newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair sees his popularity skyrocket after he coins the term, The People’s Princess, in a speech shortly after Diana’s death, while support for Buckingham Palace falls to an all time low when it appears that the Queen doesn’t share the country’s grief.

What emerges is a complex portrait of a woman caught in the shifting tides of change. As portrayed by Helen Mirren, QEII comes across as a woman with a deep sense of duty, of right and wrong and dignity, but out of touch with her subjects. Her reaction to Diana’s death is to grieve quietly, protect the young princes, Harry and William, and hold a discrete and dignified memorial. That her wishes run counter to the public and Prime Minister’s ideas of a proper memorial shows how out of touch she is.

Using news footage director Stephen Frears skillfully demonstrates the fissure between the Queen and her subjects. Just hours after Diana’s death is announced he shows us shots of the first bouquets of flowers left in tribute at the gate of Buckingham Palace. He comes back to this image several more times, and by the time we go back for the last time there is what seems to be acres of flowers, a tangible symbol of England’s grief and the Queen’s mishandling of the circumstances.

Privately we see the Queen’s confusion and sadness as she realizes the public is no longer on her side. It isn’t until Blair persists that she bends and makes a public statement and allows a public funeral. Despite his frustration with the Queen’s decisions Blair comes to respect the woman who has given her life in service to her people.    

Supporting actors turn in stellar performances. Alex Jennings as Prince Charles shows a rarely seen vulnerable side of the Prince, while James Cromwell’s stuffy Prince Phillip is played for comic relief. At the heart of the film, however, is Mirren’s performance.

Like many of the great on-screen portrayals of real people in recent years—Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote—Helen Mirren takes a subject who would have been easy to mimic and given her a rich inner life. Just as Hoffman dug deeper to get beyond Capote’s lisp and affected speech and show us a real person, Mirren breaks through the inscrutable royal façade to present a fully rounded character. Despite the famous line, “she ain’t no human being,” so memorably snarled by Johnny Rotten on God Save the Queen, Mirren’s QEII is very much flesh and blood. The Queen does something that no other movie or television show has been able to do—it humanizes Queen Elizabeth.

QUEEN OF THE DAMNED

Why try and condense two thick books into one slim motion picture? Queen of the Damned is based on Anne Rice’s novel of the same name, and The Vampire Lestat a 481 page behemoth of a book. Either story would have provided more than enough material for a film, instead we’re given only a taste of each, and a pretty bland one at that. In the title role is late R&B singer Aailyah in her final film performance. Too pretty to be truly evil, she undulates her way through her scant scenes, (she’s only in the movie for about 12 minutes) looking more like The Queen of the Darned, the sovereign of pesky.

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