Quantum of Solace

I have a little theory that whoever is doing this James Bond movies is trying to pull together a trilogy. Casino Royal was the first, and Quantum of Solace the second. And like many second acts (Indiana Jones, etc) this movie is not very good.

First I want to comment on what I call copious cut action scenes. They occur in many many movies and you'll know you're watching one when you all of a sudden don't know what's going on or what you focus on. This is when the movie uses 10-15 different cuts per second of an action scene. All of the cuts are filmed close-up with the patented we-want-to-make-you-feel-like-you're-in-the-action-shaky-cam. Add this all together and you get a feeling of "wha?" when the scene is done. It's like leaving out and misspelling numerous words of a sentence. You're not going to get to the end of the sentence and feel like the author got his point across. You're just going to say, "wha?" I guess they do it because it's cheaper. If they made the action scene realistic, so you could put a stationary camera out there and get the whole picture, it would be much harder. I would appreciate it though.

Aside from that, the movie lacks a villain. There's a couple guys you know are doing something bad, and after an hour in to the movie you learn that one of them did something bad 20 years ago, but overall you don't know what they're up to so you can't dislike them and root for Bond. It's more of, "Ok, I guess he should kill that guy. He is pretty creepy looking." That's why I feel this is a second act, and the whole story will come together in the third movie. But this is a bad idea because Bond movies don't do that. People expect Bond movies to be Bond movies, stand-alone with a villain that makes sense.

On the plus side there were some interesting camera shots that seemed hard to do. I liked them because they weren't cut to pieces, and stood out in the action scene because of it.