Quantum of Solace (2008)

We've finally come to the end of my look back at the entire James Bond franchise. This was quite the undertaking, and while there were some occasions when I wished I was doing something else, mainly when Roger Moore was involved, man was this a blast overall. I learned some things about myself as a Bond fan, and discovered some great movies that I would have in all likeliness overlooked. I even had some movies which I previously had written off come back and surprise me with how much I enjoyed them years later. Meanwhile others were bad before and continued to be so. But I've made it through those high peaks and abyssal trenches and emerged in one piece on the other side, a more savvy film enthusiast for it. This was fun. Now maybe next time I'll have to choose a series that doesn't have over twenty entries in it.

According to my recollection whilst thinking back on it after only seeing it once in the theater the day it came out, "Quantum of Solace" struck me as pretty bad. I remember how I hated the fact that it was nothing like a usual James Bond movie at all, eschewing any hint of fun whatsoever and being a very bleak and dour journey. True, "License To Kill" and even "Casino Royale" had their war-faces on, so to speak, but those still felt like Bond movies. He had gadgets and over-the-top villains to deal with, and as pissed as he got he still was able to pull off a good one-liner after wasting a dude. But in "Quantum of Solace" he's not really even doing any real spy work. He's just killing people. I believe at the time that I summed it up by saying that "Quantum of Solace" basically put The Punisher in a tuxedo and told him to make sure he never did anything to entertain us.

But after seeing it again, "Quantum of Solace" is even worse than I remembered. In fact, this movie isn't just bad. It's terrible. It's wretched. This is a legitimate piece of garbage. And I don't mean that from simply a story or script level, even though those aspects are crap, too. I'm saying that on a filmmaking level, talking pure tradecraft here, this is the most pathetic excuse for an action movie the Bond series has ever produced. I...I can't believe I'm saying this but...Crom help me this is a worse movie than "Moonraker."

Oh god.

If you had told me Clint Eastwood was actually an overgrown hedgehog I would have been less surprised than the revelation that I could hate a Bond movie more than I hate "Moonraker." I've nearly broken molars grinding my teeth over watching that piece of septic backwash. It represents everything I loathe about the Bond series when it got stupid. My DNA code would spell out S-C-R-E-W-R-O-G-E-R-M-O-O-R-E if you looked hard enough. Gazing at that film is like staring into the black, dead, blasphemous eyes of Cthulhu himself.

And I would still watch it over "Quantum of Solace." That blows my damn mind all over the walls.

Don't you be getting smug with me, though. You're not off the hook. You're better by technicality.

Having been forced to go on Wikipedia to find out just what in the hell was happening since this movie is ludicrously difficult to follow, I've determined that I don't care. It's got something to do with an ousted general in Bolivia who's trying to take the government over with the help of an evil environmentalist, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric). Greene is mildly playing the general for a sucker because he's caused a drought and has set it up so he gets the monopoly on the water supply in that area and will charge more than the dude was paying before. That's right. The villain's evil plot in this movie is to cause some jumped up South American dictator's water bill to double.

Oh no he d'in't.

The only reason Bond is there is because Greene is a member of Quantum, the Not-SPECTRE organization which briefly showed up in "Casino Royale" to do very bad things, and Bond is simply going around trying to kill as many of those people as he can. He doesn't care about Bolivia or the drought. He doesn't care about anything going on around him past "Who can I kill next?" He doesn't even address Greene's underground dam that is still there at the end of the movie. You know? The thing that shouldn't be there that was causing the drought? Sean Connery would have blown that thing sky-high and made sure the Number Two henchman was on top of the dam when it went. The movie would have ended with all seventeen citizens of Bolivia cheering as their water pumps turned on again while Bond had sex in one of the newly made lakes. But Daniel Craig doesn't care. He just wants to kill since he's James Bond and in no way ever saves the day, right?

Daniel Craig is barely recognizable as James Bond in this. Like the tone of the film, he's so mean spirited and dour that he looks depressed. I'm sure they were going for "badass" here, and true he does wreck plenty of people's collective faces, but he's doing it with such disdain for any thought of fun that it comes across more like we're watching a psychopath during one of his manic lows going on a killing spree. He doesn't seem like James Bond at any point besides jumping out of a plane and impossibly surviving when his parachute doesn't deploy until he's twenty feet above the ground. His actions may evoke images of Bond, but the attitude that defined him is nowhere to be found. I'm not sure how he's supposed to properly convey that attitude when he's got barely any dialogue in this film as it is, but that's besides the point.

The sole expression permanently locked on Craig's face is the same one you would have if you caught someone keying your car.

Besides Craig playing "an angry person" instead of 007, the rest of the cast is frankly pathetic. We've got Camille (Olga Kurylenko) who has a real beef with the general and wants to kill him. We don't learn until more than halfway though what her actual deal is, which is that she's some kind of Bolivian...agent (does Bolivia have agents?), but her character doesn't do a damn thing that matters at any point. She's just a link in the chain to get to Greene since she's his girlfriend (or something, I don't have any idea).

"Quantum of Solace" also features one of my "favorite" (see also: I can't stand them) actresses, Gemma Arterton as a useless character named Ms. Fields. She's an MI-6 agent that exists only to get killed off in an homage to "Goldfinger," and also to act really snooty and hostile towards James upon meeting him before having sex with him five minutes later for no reason at all. Bond nailing her is such an out of nowhere development that it's actually quite jarring.
  

 "Can I at least get a one liner in somewhere? Maybe something when I take White out of my trunk?"

"We'll allow you to say "Time to get out.""

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"They know I'm the same man who said "That last hand nearly killed me" in the film before, right?"

"Don't push it, Bond. We're trying to be serious. You can't be likable and serious at the same time."

"But Timothy Dalton-"

"SERIOUS ISN'T LIKABLE."

I wouldn't have minded so much expect for the fact that the entire premise of this movie is that he's supposed to be enraged at the loss of Vesper. And it's not even like he's angrily having sex with her to purge some demons. He just takes off his clothes and is casual about it. So that kind of makes his sorrow at her loss (ie. his entire motivation) ring a little hollow. I know it's a Bond movie, but you know you don't have to force him to get laid. Nothing would have changed if he hadn't had sex with her. Whatever. I don't care.

Yeah. Pro-tip: Don't reference a great movie in your crap movie.

The absolute worst, though, is our villain. You know, there have been some bad Bond villains in the past, but Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene is a special case, holding the distinction of being not only having the lamest plan, but he also gives the worst performance of any actor to portray a Bond nemesis. At no point is he intimidating. He just meekly slithers about looking like if you cloned Gary Oldman and turned him into the 98 lb. weakling who gets sand kicked in his face at the beach. And when Greene actually fights at the end, ineffectively flailing about as he swings an axe at Bond while shrieking like a howler monkey on fire, it's just embarrassing. This was a conscious choice, by the way. Director Marc Forester said that he specifically chose Amalric because he gave Greene "a pathetic quality." The stupidity of that logic makes me question if Forester has ever seen a Bond film in his life.

Oh good. It's Stansfield meets George McFly. Gaze upon your doom, humanity.

This brings me to what is the absolute death of this film. More than anything else - the script, the bad villain, Bond not acting like Bond at any point - there is one thing that makes "Quantum of Solace" the most mind-bendingly aggravating movie in this series to suffer through: Director Marc Forester and his steadfast refusal to film action scenes in a clear, comprehensible manner. This man is a perpetrator of hate crimes against cinema for his desecration of action films.

I don't know why they thought that the director of "The Kite Runner" and "Finding Neverland" was an ideal choice to make a Bond film, but it's clear that it was a mistake considering the results. As is his apparent style considering that he repeated this nausea-inducing method in "World War Z," another piece of crap, the camerawork is so jittery that a good recreation of the effect could be made by trying to read a book while flying down a dirt road at 80 mph in a car with no shocks. However, even if you could make out what you were seeing, it doesn't matter because a typical single shot during an action sequence doesn't last more than a second before cutting to another wildly shaky image that has no meaning because your eyes can't adjust to what you're seeing before it cuts again.

Well, I guess since he's shooting up, the bad guy is above him. I guess?

So because of all that, essentially what happens is that nearly every single action sequence in this film (of which there are a lot) is incomprehensible - a jumble of random pictures that might as well be a Rorschach test for all the meaning that I get out of them. I don't know what's happening. I don't know who I'm looking at half the time. I have no idea where people are in relation to each other. When they show up someplace else I have no idea how they got there. It's enough to make me want to fast forward through the action to save myself the migraine I get from trying to follow it. Why they thought this looked good I'll never know, but I am starting to remember the splitting headache I had leaving the theater after watching it.

What happens when a Bond movie's action is unwatchable? Well, we're left with watching Bond's charm and likability. What happens when he's completely unlikable? Well, then we're left with following the plot and listening to the characters talk. What happens when the plot sucks and you can't understand anything anybody is talking about anyway? Well, then you have no reason to watch, which sums up "Quantum of Solace" rather nicely. About all that's left is an opening theme song at that point, and you can look that up on Youtube. Why would you suffer for nearly two hours with garbage when the best part of the movie is over after the ten minute mark?

It's amusing to me how those annoying quick cuts in trailer are actually slower paced and easier to follow than the actual film is.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Quantum of Solace" is the worst Bond film I've ever seen. It's a nightmare of impossible to follow, overly shaky action, incomprehensible plot, pathetic or anonymous villains you don't care about, and no fun or amusement to be found at any point. It's horrifyingly bad, in fact it's one of the worst action movies I've ever suffered through, let alone Bond films. This is "A Good Day To Die Hard" level of awful. On the plus side, the next movie completely disregards it, so it's easy to just go into denial and pretend this skidmark on the underpants of the series never happened.

JAMES BOND

WILL RETURN IN

SKYFALL

End of Watch (2012)

Not being a huge fan of either cop movies nor Jake Gyllenhaal, "End of Watch" was not something I was expecting to enjoy in any large capacity. There are often issues that arise with the standard cop drama that I find to be aggravating to my particular tastes. Most noteworthy of those issues is the fact I rarely understand anything that the characters are saying due to the indecipherable "cop speak" and phonebooks full of characters mentioned only once by name, all rattled off in rapid-fire succession in a scene of dense exposition, after which we're expected to have memorized each and every one of them. It works for some, but not myself. I'm just not a huge mark for the cop drama.

Imagine my surprise, then, when "End of Watch" not only wound up being an intensely enjoyable experience, but also wound up being one of the better films I saw from 2012. In fact, had I actually seen it in 2012, it very well might have made an appearance near the back half of my Top 10 of the year list. It would have been a tough decision, but "End of Watch" had the potential to replace "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" in the number 10 slot, as bad as I would feel not including it. In any case, "End of Watch" would have at least made an honorable mention.

But that's not to say that "End of Watch" was enjoyable in the same way "The Hobbit" was. Where "The Hobbit" was a fun time full of wonderment and adventure, "End of Watch" was an intense blast of violence and fear that looks at the underbelly of the dark side of humanity and the near nightmarish existence of those who have to deal with it every day with a light the intensity of an atomic explosion. It is brutally uncompromising, unrelentingly intense, and heartrendingly humanizing.

Guess you have to laugh or go crazy in this job.

"End of Watch" follows two LAPD cops, Brian (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike (Michael Peña) through their daily routine of being police officers in one of the most dangerous beats in America. Once they run afoul of a powerful drug cartel, they find themselves marked men on the streets, and the danger seems to increase on a daily basis until a climatic and stunning final confrontation.

This is all told from the viewpoint of Brian and anyone else holding a camera, since "End of Watch" is technically a "found footage" movie. This is both effective and detrimental to the film, for reasons I'll get into later, but for now let's talk about why it works so well for this story.

The main reason this works so well is for the same reason any decent found footage movie works well: it puts us in the mindset of the characters. When Brian is running down a dark alleyway in the middle of the night, the flashlight on the end of his gun the only source of illumination as he chases after a huge gang member, it's almost like a horror movie. And it's not hard to feel just a bit of how scared that cop must be. This is especially so after seeing that the huge gang member had a few minutes prior stabbed another cop in the eye and has currently absconded with another female officer to do who knows what to her.

Violence has a tendency to erupt at the drop of a hat. There's no telling whether or not that person they stop is going to calmly go along with the process, or if they're going to pull out a gun and start shooting. Either case is just as likely. And as we follow Brian and Mike through their daily routine, it's easy to get jumpy whenever they so much as talk to anyone. It got to the point that I would get nervous whenever Brian or Mike were being polite and relaxed with people because I suspected that something bad could happen, and they wouldn't be ready for it.

Michael Peña is currently pointing a gun at that guy. You'd be doing the same. Just in case.

In addition, the film also shows the gang members causing most of the trouble as they do their thing, and later as they plot Brian and Mike's demise. This is the only bit of story outside of the main character's point of view that we get, which means that we aren't as in the dark as we would be during a normal found footage film, which both eliminates the need for clunky or overly convenient exposition and also elevates the tension since we know what's coming. But at the same time this also brings to harsh light the biggest issue with the film, and the one hurdle that the audience will need to overcome to not be irritated.

This issue is always the biggest one for any found footage movie, and it is always a question consisting of two parts: Who is filming this, and why to do they continue to do it?

Brian is filming his daily routine as part of a class he's taking. In addition to a handheld video camera, he has a small one that he clips on to his shirt (which also gets incredible hi-def picture, picks up every sound despite nobody wearing a microphone, and has amazing storage capacity), so that makes sense. Most of the time he's using the handheld one, but whenever there's action going on it switches to the shirt camera, which has more of a first-person view. That all makes sense. Of course that's putting aside the legality of Brian openly filming all of this police procedure, which I'm not entirely sure of.

But here's where it gets kind of stupid. Why are the gangsters filming this stuff? I suppose I could see someone filming the occasion as they pile into a van and perform a drive-by shooting of a rival gang, but why would they still be filming during the shooting itself? Wouldn't their hands be kind of full? Why would the rival gang be conveniently filming a seemingly random, trivial conversation at that very moment the other gang drove by and shot them up? Why would they continue to film as bullets started flying? Why would the person being shot at just stand there out in the open, making sure the van with Mexicans firing AK-47s out of it was nicely in frame? Why would they shove a camera in the face of their fallen comrade screaming "Ey yo, B, you okay?! You okay, B?!" instead of actually helping them?

And if this is the kind of thing that jumps out at you, "End of Watch" also has a very strange thing going on that I like to call the "God Camera." Every once in a while the movie will reach a point where there's simply no possible way that they could justify anybody holding a camera for any reason, even for a found footage movie. Either everybody has a gun in their hand, or everybody there is all dead. Or both. So at that point, instead of getting either creative or insultingly stupid with it, the filmmakers seem to have simply decided "screw it" and had a camera just THERE, like you would see in any normal movie. While this does make the action more coherent, I had to ask two questions: "Who is filming this now?" and "If we're going to switch like that, why have the rest of it be found footage in the first place?"

Seriously. Who the hell is filming this shot?

If this is the kind of thing that bugs you, then "End of Watch" might be a little irritating. But despite that little unfortunate side effect of found footage movies, this movie was still an experience that knocked my socks off. The characters all felt so incredibly real, and Michael Peña in particular was simply stunning, but the entire cast deserves a lot of credit. And it's really important in a found footage movie that the acting be top notch naturalistic, or it's simply not going to work at all. By the time "End of Watch" was over, and the shocking ending hit me in the face before leaving with a seemingly random but oddly poignant final scene, there wasn't a moment where I hadn't bought these characters completely.

It may not do anything overly unique with the story, what with the shades-of-grey characters of both police and criminals who are mostly portrayed not as "good vs. evil" but simply as people caught in a savage, unforgiving world and doing what they can to survive. But how many variations on a police story can you really have anyway? What's important is how well it tells the story, and "End of Watch" tells its story extremely well. And it tells it while being intense and tragic as hell.

Check out the trailer for "End of Watch" (NSFW)

THE BOTTOM LINE - "End of Watch" is a gritty, intense, and dark film that doesn't pull too many punches with the violence or how real it comes across. Apart from some irritation with the point of view and how exactly we're seeing all this, it's one of the most powerful films that I've seen from 2012. Michael Peña should probably be up for some awards for it. Seriously, you should check this one out, guys, because it's really freaking good.