The release of No Time to Die marks the end of Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond. (This might qualify as a spoiler for that movie, but we’re talking about a man who once said, of whether he’d like to continue playing the secret agent, “I’d rather break this glass and slash my wrists. No, not at the moment.”) No Time to Die is absurdly long and suffers from, in this writer’s opinion, a terrible third act—what if Rami Malek’s strangely ageless villain is actually meta-plotting to tank the film?—but for the most part does what it says on the poster, wrapping up the Craig era with the requisite violence and self-regarding gravity.
The consensus among critics and fans is that the Craig Bonds before this alternated between good and bad. His debut, the 2006 remake of Casino Royale, and 2012’s Sam Mendes-directed Skyfall are widely considered to be among the best in the franchise’s nearly 60-year history. But the best of the last five Bond movies is in fact the one that was roundly panned, to the point where its convoluted title has become shorthand for blockbuster disappointment: 2008’s Marc Forster-directed Quantum of Solace.
Quantum of Solace was criticized at the time for a plot that is supposedly difficult to follow—the locations are, in order: Central Italy, London, Port-au-Prince, Bregenz, coastal Italy, La Paz, exurban Bolivia, and the Atacama Desert, followed by a coda where Bond travels to Kazan—and for action setpieces that are strangely staged and edited. The latter point is the film’s lone shortcoming. An opening car chase is inert, and the CGI in a pursuit that begins around the 10-minute mark grows so cartoonish that the sequence eventually looks like it’s been lifted from Harry Potter. It is easy to imagine the Bourne movies loomed large in production meetings; the shaky handheld photography and frenetic cutting during some of these action scenes is lazily lifted from the Paul Greengrass playbook. (It would be fair to note, however, that this element has aged only as poorly as the ‘Look! Our stunt coordinator knows parkour’ choreography from Casino Royale’s first chase.)
But the action improves as the movie progresses. The sequence where Bond pilots a damaged plane across Bolivian desert is remarkable for the way it communicates the g-force Bond has to fight against; a game of cat and mouse in speedboats off the Haitian coast is the franchise at its Platonic ideal. More important than the stunt work, though, is Quantum of Solace’s political point of view, which is the most sophisticated—and most haunting—of any Bond film, and perhaps any tentpole movie of its kind this century. The best scene in Skyfall is the one where Javier Bardem’s villain, Raoul Silva, is introduced and gives a long, metaphorical speech about intelligence agents as rats who no longer have a taste for anything but each other. Yet that movie resists confirming his belief, instead drawing clean lines of right and wrong, Country and Anarchy. (At one point Judi Dench’s M quotes Tennyson.) Quantum of Solace actually embodies Silva’s view. The boundlessly powerful politicians, spies, and industrialists are all essentially nihilists, willing to destroy anyone and anything for incremental gains of money or influence.
Though the information trickles out the way it always does in these films, the plot is essentially this: A powerful network of billionaires and aspiring billionaires, which has tentacles in private industry, government, and even MI6, plans to stage a coup in Bolivia and seize control of its water supply, selling it back to the new government at an exorbitant rate. (How’s that for a plot device that grows more sinister with age?) That network’s leader, played by Mathieu Amalric, is an environmental philanthropist, claiming the money he raises is for research and reforestation. Bond, along with an ex-Bolivian secret service agent played by Olga Kurylenko, aim to stop this scheme before the puppet government is installed.
The film does not aim to contrast British or American intelligence with the antagonist organization. Instead, the CIA is seen to be actively facilitating the coup, and after the foreign secretary argues to M that Britain’s interests are also aligned, M toes this line in front of Bond. (Representatives from both governments admonish their supposedly naive colleagues for their squeamishness about working alongside the syndicate, though the importance and morality of the plan itself go unquestioned.) Nor is Bond motivated by humanitarian concern. He simply wants to avenge the murder of Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, his love interest from Casino Royale, who he believes was killed by the same people who are now eyeing Bolivia.
And so the movie is at times consumed with the horror that comes with this sort of shadow war. Deaths are rendered rote and nearly meaningless. When Kurylenko’s Camille Montes suggests that Bond’s ally, who is dying after being shot by Bolivian police, rush to a hospital, both this ally and Bond eye her wearily: these are not people who can show up in an emergency room without sparking an international conflict, or simply being disappeared. (Bond holds his friend as he dies, then tosses his body in a dumpster.) Later, Montes explains to Bond that she, too, is seeking personal revenge. When Montes was a child, the exiled general who now stands to run Bolivia murdered her father, raped her mother and sister, and left Montes in their home as he burned it to the ground. Yet not even this story is contorted into a righteous moral parable. “He was a cruel man,” Montes says sheepishly of her dad, who was involved in Bolivia’s military junta. “But he was my father.”
None of which is to say the film is humorless. In fact, Quantum of Solace integrates the franchise’s inherent b-movie camp better than any of the other Craig Bonds. The trick is that this lighter touch never threatens to unmoor the script from its terrifying foundation. When Bond and his friend—the one who will later be shot and killed—arrive in La Paz, they are stonewalled by a British embassy worker assigned to chaperone Bond, who is nominally suspended from MI6. She takes them to a dilapidated hotel; Bond balks. She insists that it represents the upper limit of their cover, which is that they’re a trio of teachers on sabbatical. Unmoved, Bond directs a cab to a lavish luxury hotel, walks up to the front desk, and says in Spanish: “We are teachers on sabbatical, and we have just won the lottery.” The embassy worker is charmed; she and Bond sleep together. Only later, Bond is shown her body on that very same bed: she’s been killed and drenched in oil, a message from the syndicate. It’s an unforgettable image, and a more sly subversion of the Bond mythos—that these romantic dalliances are simply a charming pitstop on the way to victory—than even the famous Goldfinger scene it references.
Quantum of Solace’s Bond is tortured where Skyfall’s is merely “tortured.” He drinks not suavely, but to the point of ugly drunkenness; he kills dozens of people, loses at least two friends, and in the end—despite he and Camille successfully killing both the philanthropist and the general—the Bolivian people don’t even get their water back. As mentioned, the script is filled with nihilists who believe the world is a decaying corpse ready to be stripped for parts. But the movie itself is not so nihilistic as to believe that spies can do anything about it.