In 2021, Matt Damon’s name does not carry a great deal of power. He’s still in movies, but he’s clearly not a big name draw anymore - Stillwater, a classic-style vehicle for him, flopped at the box office last month. He is more famous for his weird willingness to admit his regular use of homophobic slurs in everyday life than his acting work.
In 2008, though? Oh boy. In 2008, Matt Damon was hot shit. People could not get enough of Matt Damon. You could turn around and bump your head on Matt Damon, just on your everyday business. The main reason for this is the Bourne trilogy, which had wrapped up the year before, and would never be revisited again by Hollywood (and don’t let anybody - or Google - tell you otherwise).
I love the Bourne trilogy (the only Bourne movies) dearly. They’re brilliant action films with an excellent supporting cast and just enough pulpy paranoia stuff to keep interest up between set-pieces. There are a lot of reasons for their success - Damon is one of them, even if he’s really just autopiloting for lots of the time - but a big one was the way the director Paul Greengrass filmed action sequences. You’ll know it as shaky-cam, and it gets a bad rep these days. It’s synonymous with incoherence, a lack of confidence in the product, and with a hyperactivity that gets in the way of good storytelling.
In the Bourne movies, though, shaky-cam ruled. It’s a perfect fit for the sweaty, frantic nature of the Bourne series, and it allows Greengrass to stage some properly violent sequences without tripping over the PG-13 rating. Lots of people thought so too, and for a while, shaky-cam was all the rage. It changed the way people thought about action films.
It gave James Bond a big old inferiority complex.
Look at this opening sequence. It is a nightmare.
What is going on?! It’s just rapid cuts and loud noise and overwhelming confusion. Here’s the flipside of shakycam - it makes action sequences into complete mulch in the wrong hands. There’s the impression of stuff happening, with no clarity of what the stuff actually is. Smash! Crash! Boom! Where the fuck are all the cars are coming from? Who is Bond driving away from? Who is Bond?! All kind of mysteries here. Here’s Bond learning the wrong lessons from Bourne: that all you need for good action sequences is to be confusing as all fuck, and audiences will simply love it.
It’s not just the shakycam, mind. All of Quantum of Solace is haunted by its clear desire to be more like Matt Damon. Just like Bourne, the plot is ‘grounded’ in vaguely political talk, the villain’s plan is ‘realistic’, the hero is mostly uninterested in personal relationships and, in fact, in talking altogether. Bond villains usually have wild plans to make their own earthquakes or something, but that’s not very Bourne. What’s much more Bourne is an evil plot to monopolise the Bolivian water supply as part of a wider sequence of Western-backed coups. Evil!! Bond villains are also weird-looking and have some kind of disability (because there’s nothing scarier than someone who doesn’t conform to normal standards, of course), but that’s not very Bourne either, so the villain here is Just Some Guy. He’s called Dominic, and he is phenomenally boring.
Look, none of this is to say that Bond trying on a different set of clothes is a bad thing per se. As we’ll get into with the next two films, the Craig era is usually at its best when it’s trying something different for the franchise that isn’t Yer Dad’s Bond. There are people out there who probably believe that Bond is at its best when its hero is fighting off penis lasers launched by a foreign dude with a bad back or whatever (and lo and behold, they’d get everything they fucking wanted in two films, grr), but that’s silly. Bond should change with the times. Being like it was in 1962 is creepy and offputting and have I mentioned how shit Spectre is for that exact reason?
(Yeah, we’ll get there.)
To its credit, Quantum of Solace has a good concept and interesting intent. The idea of the villains being the kingmakers behind Western power is cool, and the CIA character who’s just obscenely chilled out about backing coups and dictators all over the spot as long as they serve American interests is as close as this fundamentally imperialist franchise will get to biting the hand that feeds it. I even quite like what the film is trying to do with Bond, by making his dead-eyed comfort with killing and lack of real inner life the point of the character and a direct result of the previous film. I love it for some stupid reason, but the Bond series is only actually interesting like half the time. This is one of those times, oddly enough.
It’s just that all of it is executed with all the panache of me unloading the dishwasher. It’s rushed, halfhearted, spots are missing and everyone clearly just wants to get it out of the way (sorry, Dad). The obvious culprit for this is the writers strike I spent a whole extra newsletter banging on about, which clearly left the film with an absolute skeleton of a plot which had to be filled out with emergency rewrites by Daniel Craig and hope.
I think I mentioned before that Daniel Craig isn’t a writer, but it bears repeating that Daniel Craig isn’t a writer.
Quantum of Solace is 106 minutes long, way shorter than the other Craig films, which are all between 140 and 150 (it’s a full hour shorter than No Time to Die). Normally, I’d be pretty happy for the time saved, but it’s not like the film feels shorter. It feels as if it was meant to be the same length as all the others, just with almost every moment of connective tissue or character development either cut out or not written in the first place. It gets slightly better as it goes along, but considering that it starts with a half hour that’s about as sugared-up in its location-hopping and new plot points as fucking Suicide Squad, slightly still means “not very good”. There’s a heaviness to things - the revenge quest by the empty shell of a guy, the insidious disaster capitalism of the bad guys - that the film wants to convey, but it has all the weight of one of those funsize boxes of Rice Krispies (not a filling breakfast, folks) because the execution is so barebones. Whenever the film concentrates on plot, it has a Big Wikipedia Page Energy to it that prioritises giving you sufficient information, as opposed to what stories are meant to do, which is making you feel stuff about that information. It leads to ass-backwards mistakes like everything to do with Gemma Arteton’s character, which brings back a Woman Are Objects spirit to the franchise after the last film actually made some headway in undoing that trope, complete with resolution that leans on the audience recognising a famous image from the 1960s.
It’s a Bourne film that doesn’t recognise why the Bourne films worked. It’s too plotty to be a sparse action film, too thin to be a good conspiracy thriller. Its action isn’t strong enough to justify its existence, but it has about two scenes which depict the characters involved as given people. It’s a middle ground between trying to appease tradition and Be Matt Damon that finds a big old sinkhole and jumps into it.
Quantum of Solace is the one everyone involved admits was a mistake. Nobody, from Daniel Craig to the writers, were satisfied with how this thing turned out. That’d usually be fine, because the Bond series has driven headfirst into a dead end about 16 times before and has always made its way back out by the next entry.
But, well, it’s like what Yoda or the rat guy from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles said. Failure is a teacher, and it depends what lesson you take from it. I’d argue that Quantum of Solace is a lesson in being patient with writers strikes, and also in trying not to replicate the style of another action series without putting the legwork in. If the following two films are evidence, the powers that be took it as a lesson that people don’t like it when James Bond isn’t like how their dad remembers.
So begins the second half of Daniel Craig’s tenure: the journey back to your dad’s James Bond. Something, finally, for the dads.
Next time: Skyfall! The end of Britain’s golden Olympic year, where we all came together to celebrate the nation’s favourite hero in one of his best adventures yet. But there was a deep darkness within…
(Olympics talk. It’ll be Olympics talk.)