Dir. Marc Foster, UK/US, 2008, 106 mins
Cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric
Review by Carol Allen
While Casino Royale reinvented the franchise with a rougher, tougher Bond in Daniel Craig, this latest outing under Foster’s direction takes the franchise in a few new directions. For the first time ever it picks up from where the previous one left off with Bond making his escape in an impressive but somewhat confusing car chase and effectively putting us into the middle episode of what feels like a trilogy. In Casino, Bond was betrayed by and lost the woman he loved. Here he is left grieving, fighting his desire for revenge and wanting answers to two questions — what is this mysterious organisation he is fighting here and what was the truth about his beloved Vesper? By the end of the film, he has those answers but he gets them off screen and we the audience are left in the dark, presumably to wait for the next episode to be fully briefed. Rather like Saturday morning pictures for adults.
The film is beautifully produced with plenty of spectacular action and glamorous locations, largely, though not exclusively, in South America. As well as that opening car chase, there’s the now obligatory pursuit on foot across rooftops, a boat chase, an aeroplane chase and a thrilling sequence at the opera, where what’s going on back stage is far more exciting than the opera itself and is particularly memorable. So is the hotel in Bolivia, where Bond fights it out with his main adversary, which seems to have an exploding canister in every room — Health and Safety regulations obviously not being as strict there as in other parts of the world. Because his situation is dominated by the loss of Vesper and his internal battle with his desire for revenge, Craig as Bond doesn’t have a great emotional range to play with here. He’s a bit muted, dour and rather on one note, apart from one short flirtatious interlude with Gemma Arterton as Agent Fields, who is sent by M to bring Bond in and who then falls for his fatal charms. His fans may also be disappointed that this is one of the rare occasions in this movie that Craig gets to take his shirt off and display that finely honed torso. Amalric makes a unusual, charismatic and suitably contemporary villain as Dominic Greene, a business man with an ostensibly philanthropic “green” agenda to save the environment, when what he’s really after is hogging the world’s water supplies for his own ends and it would have been good to have seen more of Giancarlo Giannini as the former spy with whom Bond has a history, who is persuaded to help 007.
The traditional decorative Bond girl now appears to be history. The nearest to her in this film is Arterton but she is delightfully funny rather than being a bland and brainless dolly bird. Her scenes with Bond provide an all too fleeting opportunity for the sexy verbal exchanges one associates with 007 and his women, while her last appearance in the film slyly refers back to a much earlier Bond girl, Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger (1964). Kurylenko as Camille, who leads Bond to Greene, is a bit of a disappointment. She’s very pretty but casting a Russian as a Bolivian seems a bit perverse and her accent makes her dialogue often difficult to hear. The actress who really scores star points is Judi Dench, who has developed the role of M in a most satisfying way, since her casting in 1995 first marked this positive advance for the image of older women in popular culture. Operating now from a 21st century high-tech environment, her dry delivery contributes most of the wit and fun in the film, something which is otherwise largely absent in this action-packed but otherwise rather downbeat movie.
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