SmartRemarks

The latest 007 picture is a thoroughly enjoyable movie, and a worthy successor to its franchise-reinvigorating predecessor. If A Quantum of Solace is not quite as artistically satisfying as Casino Royale, still it’s both a successful action thriller in its own right and an excellent James Bond film by any measure, certainly far less of a drop-off in quality than the second and third Jason Bourne pictures were from The Bourne Identity.

It was risky for producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson to reboot the James Bond franchise, as they did with 2006’s Royale, but it would have been riskier to let it continue to stagnate in the grips of its own formula. My personal preference, if they were going to reboot Bond, would have been to make the series a period piece, and return the character to his Cold War roots. They certainly didn’t choose that route… but if the cinematic Bond is now well and truly severed from the life history and political context Ian Fleming imagined in his novels, he’s also far more interesting than he’d been at any point in the last 30 or 40 years, and feels like he actually belongs in the 21st century.
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