Quantum of Solace

Quantum of Solace is a movie about two things: chases, and over-editing.
It seems like the makers wanted to make a movie about a guy getting chased, and/or chasing a character, over, and over, and over. The movie starts off with a car chase in a tunnel at the side of a body of water, and then the chase ends when Bond gets back to his lair. Then, the film only gives us about 10 minutes of exposition in a brief interrogation scene before throwing us into a foot chase across Spain or whatever random European country Bond is in now. After this lengthy foot chase is over, we are told through an over-extensive use of technology, marked bills, laundering money, plot elements, and blah blah exposition, that Bond must now go to another random European country to find another random bad guy (the Bourne similarities are already lining up). In this new country, Bond enters the bad guy's hotel room and fights him off in classic Bourne style with a pen and a q-tip before walking outside and hap-hazardly coming upon the movie's female lead. This scene eventually leads Bond to get on a motorcyle and start a motorcycle chase of the female's car. Just when that finishes, we get some more exposition about needlessly-confusing events that priorly occurred, and then the female character's alignment gets thrown off to the "good" side for convenient plot reasons. Bond proceeds to chase after the newly good female character on his motorcycle, only to jump off his motorcycle onto a boat, whereupon a boat chase starts. After this, it appears that the movie has exhausted every form of transportation usable for chase sequences when it once again proves you wrong. Bond eventually gets on an airplane in the middle of the desert in order to start an airplane chase with his fellow enemy airplanes, thus giving this movie the honor of containing the most varied chase sequences ever.

The second item that the movie does exceedingly--not well--(imitating the Bourne Supremacy in the process) is over-edit every single shot and action sequence to the point where you start to lose sense of what is going on. Straight from the get-go you get a The Dark Knight-esque zooming in camera technique, but Quantum interrupts this serenely panning camera by repeatedly chopping in flashing splits of different shots. Even in every action scene in the movie, it constantly switches the camera angle every time a different action is preformed. Villain lifts up his arm to stab Bond? Switch the camera angle. Bond turns his head to dodge? Switch camera angle. It's annoying to have to reorient yourself every split second in an action scene, because then you lose the idea of what's going on. I'm pretty sure it's quite possible to pull off an exciting and daring action sequence without changing the camera angle every 0.8 seconds.

That being said, is it a bad movie? No, not really, but it's not a very good movie either. The entire movie is just a concoction of action and/or chase sequences in a variety of European countries fueled by some arbitrary plot reasons primarily focused on revenge. After all is said and done, there is not much more to be talked about.

Worth Watching? If you want action, but not story.