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November 20-26, 2008
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A new type of Bondage
by Michael Phillips
You’re Damme right!
by Michael Phillips
 A new type of Bondage
by Michael Phillips
Chilly-eyed, bullet-shaped Daniel Craig is the right man for the James Bond franchise, and his second outing confirms it. At their wussiest, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan seemed determined to fulfill creator Ian Fleming’s fleeting, facetious description of 007 from the novel Casino Royale as “an expensive gigolo.” Craig is nobody’s trick, although one of the many virtues (at least for straight women and gay men) of the hugely entertaining 2006 film version of Casino Royale was the shot of Craig rising out of the ocean looking like the best kind of trouble. Suddenly Craig was the new Ursula Andress, at least for a few seconds. Yet Casino Royale brought Bond back to basics, providing a satisfying origin myth, keeping the action human-scaled and the gadgetry to a minimum
while retooling Britain’s killer diller for a nervous new century of spy-versus-spying.
Compared with Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace is a disappointment. Craig anchors it, and Judi Dench’s M enjoys some fine, stern scenes, but director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball, The Kite Runner) isn’t much of an action man. There’s plenty, but half the time it’s visually incoherent. A minute past the (drab) opening credits, a superhumanly implacable Craig is careening through a snaky Italian tunnel, pursued by enemy agents with vehicular or machine-gun homicide on their minds. Simple premise. Oldie but goodie. Yet the way it’s shot and cut, it plays like a parody of a car commercial shot in the style of a Bond film.
The dominant theme is revenge. The tale picks up minutes after the end of Casino Royale. Bond is after the shadowy Quantum organization for killing his lady friend. Olga Kurylenko, the surly Ukrainian-born model and fledgling actress, plays the mistress of the primary adversary, a ruthless entrepreneur (Mathieu Almaric) buying up desert land in Bolivia for reasons unknown. We’re a long way from the global domination days, in other words, when a Bond film wasn’t a Bond film without a ray gun.
About that title Quantum of Solace. In the Fleming short story, unrelated to the movie’s screenplay, the phrase refers to a measure of comfort needed to get by in life. The only title less Bondian than Quantum of Solace would, in fact, be Measure of Comfort. The film keeps Craig’s 007 suffering and brooding and seething right up until the end, with only a brief dalliance with a fellow agent (Gemma Arterton) as the story whips from Italy to London to Bolivia-played-by-Chile, with side trips to Haiti (played by Panama) and a detour to Austria for a nifty surveillance sequence. During a performance of Puccini’s Tosca, Bond tracks the whereabouts and the what-they’re-sayin’s of various Quantum operatives in attendance.
That segment works. What I miss, though, are scenes such as that incredible construction-site pursuit in Casino Royale. Its equivalent here comes early, in a rooftop scramble (equally derived from the Bourne series) followed by an interior scaffolding scene undone by an editing rhythm only rabid fans of Moulin Rouge could love. The miracle of the second and third Bourne pictures had as much to do with director Paul Greengrass’ mastery of violent action in close quarters as with the propulsion of the editing. In Quantum of Solace, there’s a boat chase that left me baffled as to who was going how fast in which direction chasing whom, and why.
In one of the Quantum of Solace posters, Craig wields an absurdly large gun, as if to reassure the global audience: “This film may have a wimpy title, but never fear.” The weapon itself, unless I missed it, makes no appearance in the film. Fine with me. I didn’t miss it. What I missed was the class, pacing and authority of Casino Royale. Not every director is well-suited to Bondland. “There’s something horribly efficient about you,” Kurylenko says to Craig at one point. The same goes for the film.
—MCT
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 You’re Damme right!
by Michael Phillips
JCVD is an unexpectedly droll game of three-card monte disguised as an action film that turns into a (fake) reality-TV-style documentary and then into a hostage thriller. At one point — a crazy high point — Jean-Claude Van Damme, the star of Bloodsport, delivers a wrenching confessional monologue straight to the camera for nearly 10 minutes, fighting back tears when he’s not actually weeping. For real. It’s fake, but the pain, self-pity, belligerence and pathos are real. So are the filmmaking skills of the director, Mabrouk El Mechri, who also co-wrote this daydream of celebrity ups and downs and the Van Damme image.
At first we think we’re at a mid-’90s Van Damme movie. In a giddily sustained single take, while the opening credits come and go, the “muscles from Brussels” offs dozens of anonymous enemies in an urban warfare setting, kicking, shooting, knifing and annihilating with extreme prejudice. Then the sequence comes to an abrupt end, and Van Damme, panting, consults with his blasé young director. “It’s very difficult for me to do everything in one shot, you know? I’m 47 years old,” he says.
The star’s star has waned, and he has custody battles to wage involving his daughter, as well as a drug-and-philandering rep to cloud his recent past, and JCVD makes hay on all of it. When Van Damme, on a trip to a Brussels post office, finds himself embroiled in a heist and then a hostage situation, he must draw upon his inner Van Damme to resolve it. This leads to the big monologue, which is jaw-dropping: When the visibly shaken Van Damme wails, “It’s not my fault if I was cut out to be a star. I asked for it!” the line between fantasy and reality becomes a blur.
The film sags in the middle section, and it’s more a novelty item than a fully formed work. But it’s very entertaining. And Van Damme proves himself a brave, possibly foolhardy actor, which is more than Steven Seagal ever did.
—MCT
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