Philadelphia Weekly

How fascinating is it that 2008's two most inconsolable, borderline psychotic movie heroes are Batman and James Bond?

It's fun to watch pop culture icons shift with the tenor of the times, and whereas not too long ago Agent 007 and the Caped Crusader once offered campy escapism--played with tongues planted firmly in cheek by the likes of Adam West and Roger Moore--nowadays our fantasy figures are awfully grim. In Quantum of Solace, his second outing as Ian Fleming's suave super-spy, Daniel Craig makes even Christian Bale's scowling Bruce Wayne seem like the life of the party.

This is a cynical bruiser of a movie, the bleakest and bloodiest mainstream blockbuster since ... well, The Dark Knight.

Casino Royale (2006) is widely credited with bringing the Bond franchise back to basics, which is only partially true. Directed by Martin Campbell, the film slyly offered all the conventional pleasures of a James Bond adventure--exotic locations, hot babes, high fashion, luxury toys and outrageous action--but with an emphasis on emotion and character development that made it feel light years removed from Pierce Brosnan's recent romps with space lasers and invisible cars, despite being nearly as preposterous.

Quantum of Solace is more ambitious and less successful, tackling some of the more extravagant 007 traditions Royale left untouched, trying to wrestle them into a recognizable, politically savvy reality. Picking up mere minutes after Royale ended, we discover a vengeful Bond still reeling from the death of his beloved Vesper (Eva Green) at the hands of a shadowy international terrorist organization.

The film doesn't begin well. Director Marc Forster is a peculiar choice for this material, as he specializes in soppy Oscar-bait melodramas like Finding Neverland and Monster's Ball and clearly has no idea how to shoot an action scene. The elaborate stunts, coordinated by Bourne movie specialist Dan Bradley, are visual muddles, Forster's camera constantly shaking for no apparent reason and zoomed in at least 10 feet too close for us to get any sense of the spatial dynamics.

The film's first 30 minutes hurtle from one set piece to another without any pause for plotting. It's more trying than invigorating.

But a funny thing happens once everybody slows down and gets a chance to talk. Quantum of Solace gets interesting. Really interesting. Riffing on Fleming's original dastardly world-domination cabal SPECTRE, Paul Haggis' shrewd screenplay depicts a coalition of multinational corporations working behind the scenes to manipulate governments and hoard natural resources in underdeveloped countries. The CIA and MI-6 serve as oblivious patsies for the all-powerful conglomerates, while sinister Dominic Greene (art-house hero and Roman Polanski look-alike Mathieu Amalric) gets away with murder by pretending to be a philanthropic environmentalist.

It's a sad, scary new world order, forcing Bond to go rogue after his agency is hamstrung by diplomatic deference to American oil interests.

Craig charges forward; his sharklike 007 is always in motion, ice blue eyes locked in a murderous rage, leaving a trail of rubble and bodies behind him. Jeffrey Wright returns as CIA sidekick Felix Leiter, but it's also a canny reprisal of his Colin Powell performance in Oliver Stone's W., choking back bile at U.S. policies he can barely stomach. He's got some brilliantly written beery banter with Bond, both of them holed up in a Bolivian cantina swapping cracks about their mutual organizations' various imperial follies.

The title is ironic, as there's precious little solace to be found here. Olga Kurylenko provides the required Bond girl va-va-voom, but she's got a tragic history of her own and turns out to be even more hell-bent on vengeance than our hero. How appropriate that their relationship is consummated not by sex, but by Bond teaching her how to kill.

Quantum doesn't always feel very much like a Bond picture, sacrificing the series' typical alpha-male fantasies for something a bit grittier and more unhinged. (One vicious homage to Goldfinger aside, most of the allusions are to Mike Hodges' nasty 1971 noir, Get Carter.) When the third act ushers in a usual 007 villain's impregnable remote fortress, the bow to convention clangs against the harshness that's come before.

But what lingers after Quantum of Solace, besides the urge to whack the director over the head with a rolled-up newspaper, is the sheer pitilessness of its outlook. As in The Dark Knight, there's a deeply dismaying sense of a world without rules and nobody looking out for us save for that damaged, sadistic maniac who's ostensibly the hero.

I guess escapism ain't what it used to be. Our childhood idols grew up and got mean.