Chasing down the Royal flush

The thrill is gone - so should read the epitaph of the latest installment of the James Bond series, Quantum of Solace.

For all its murderous rage and quick-cut action, Solace has neither the adrenaline rush nor the quiet grace promised by its top-notch predecessor, Casino Royale. Where the last film took a delightfully revisionist stance on the recently sagging Bond legacy, the sequel tries to be bigger, faster and stronger without the narrative meat to back it up.

It's a Michael Bay nightmare of tumbling vehicles and hydrogen explosions, obtuse angles and cold-blooded killings, which could be embraceable enough if the filmmakers answered just one simple question: Why should we continue to care about Bond?

Swept up in the glory of cross-continent location shooting (Italy! Austria! Chile!), director Marc Forster (The Kite Runner) loses much of the energy and charm Casino Royale spent restoring to Agent 007 (Daniel Craig, The Golden Compass). The scribes (Paul Haggis, In The Valley of Elah and Royale screenwriter Neil Purvis) balk at furthering the character, opting to set up one blaring chase scene after another.

As we last left Bond, he was hot on the trail of his lover's killers, a global network of baddies we (and Britain's MI6 secret service) come to know as Quantum. With little time passed in between the films, the sleepless nights and bouts of alcohol have quickly sunken into Bond's eyes, reducing him to a well trained psychotic killer.

From there, the race is on. After a particularly clunky opener with a satisfactory punch line and the obligatory graphics-heavy title sequence (set to Jack White's gnarling "Another Way to Die"), Solace settles down a bit, and the trajectory unravels. In underestimating the opposition, M (Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal) and the London secret ops have let their guard down and allowed spies to walk in their midst.

Through some convenient gadgetry, the London intelligence crew tracks their targets to Haiti, where Bond encounters Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), a murderer who deals in nation-building and destabilization. Fronting as an environmentally concerned philanthropist, Greene sets his eyes on Bolivia, where he plans to reinstate a military dictator to his financial benefit.

The morality play bubbling under the surface of Solace fits well enough, but the script remains fragmented in its thematic outlay. Though Bond suffers from what M calls "inconsiderable rage" - she may have a point; he offs nearly every man he comes in contact with - the morality of his actions never really intersect with the larger wheeling and dealing done by the powers above him.

Of course, Bond refuses to play the puppet. Fueled by his thirst for vengeance as much as his sense of duty, he defies M's orders and goes after Greene and his cohorts.

Stone-faced and severe, Craig plays the ruthless killer well, working with what little dialogue he has to chew through. Solace opts more for the questionable poetry of gunfire and car crashes than wordplay, though Bond gets a few clever quips in here and there.

He gets his kicks in bed, too (off-screen, as the PG-13 franchise warrants), but with murder on his mind, Bond has never been less interested in bedding centerfold beauties. His featured Bolivian counterpart, Camille (Olga Kurylenko, Max Payne), shares his bloodlust and a sobbing backstory, but there's never much between them - sexual or otherwise.

As the bodies and building wreckage piles up, the emotional damage doesn't make it out alive. A lover scorned can cause a hell of a lot of pain when he happens to be cinema's most bulletproof spy, but the filmmakers don't allow the audience a second to soak in any of it.

The slapdash editing gives us only a glimpse of the endless series of expensive stunts and even less of a sense of character. Bond has recovered from far worse hurts in the past (Tomorrow Never Dies, anyone?), but it's unclear how long this one could take to heal.

zherrm@gmail.com

RATING: 2.5 out of 5 stars