ALL FLAME NO FIRE

Quantum of Solace

Directed by Marc Forster

Written by Paul Haggis,

Neal Purvis and Robert Wade

Starring Daniel Craig,

Mathieu Amalric

and Olga Kurylenko

Classification: PG

**

Two years ago, Casino Royale stripped down the accumulated bloat, scraped away the rusted-in risibility and revitalized the franchise with a grittier Bond. Yet he was still Bond. Sure, in the meaty paws of Daniel Craig, this 007 shed as much blood as he spilled and, with his nether regions dangling from a broken cane chair, gave torturous new meaning to taking one for the home team. However, away from the killing fields, the guy had the martini-sipping, dinner-jacket-wearing, bon-mot-swapping, bedding-the-babe-du-jour goods. Craig ramped up the substance without diluting the style, the trademark savoir faire that has long tickled male and female fancies alike. But that was two years ago.

Now along comes Quantum of Solace, a sequel that immediately picks up the plot of its predecessor, and then proceeds to drive the redeemed franchise right off the deep, dark end. Welcome to a James Bond so mired in grief, so devastated by the demise of his lady love, that insomnia is his only bedmate, that martinis once sipped are blindly guzzled, that his licence to kill has degenerated into an all-access pass to murder, that his sense of humour has become as flaccid as his libido.

Yes, all doldrums and no dapper, welcome to a Bond who has broken his covenant with the audience and to a movie that, keen to continue steering away from decades of gimmicky hyperbole, has badly overcorrected. A silly spy may be laughable, but a sulking thug is just a bore.

In fact, by shackling the poor fellow in grief's grey chains, Craig - easily the best pure actor to take on the role - is prevented from plying his trade, at least beyond dressing down his beefcake in a perpetual scowl. Hell, he almost seems miscast here. By these diminished criteria for employment in Her Majesty's secret service - just lots of brawn, a taste for vengeance and a single look of wall-to-wall gloom - the search for a reinvented James Bond might have stopped with a resurrected Charles Bronson.

Worse, Marc Forster ( Monsters Ball, Finding Neverland) is not the director for this job, a suspicion that accelerates into a certainty with the opening car chase. There, Forster does what the kinetically ungiftedalways do, cutting so frenetically that a sequence meant to excite simply perplexes. And if Bond is robbed of his flair, reduced to one more dark knight on one more errant quest, then you damn well better put some great action into the action flick. But, with a single notable exception, all attempts at speed only slow things down. First those cars, then boats, later planes, the conveyances differ but it's the same old problem - the only suspense comes in wondering which explosion will prove big enough to bring the tedium to an end. Hey that blew up real good - must be over now.

Puzzling too is the plot, although, in fairness, the sequel does reward familiarity with the original: Those armed with that knowledge will be merely confused; everyone else is free to grapple with total bewilderment. There's the usual globetrotting, of course, except that now it's globe-trudging, as James the Depressed mopes around his lonely planet. In Haiti, he meets Dominic Greene, the alleged villain of the piece. Alleged, because he's more oddball than Oddjob, just a scrawny businessman who uses an eco-friendly cover to hide his dirty doings - encouraging wannabe South American dictators to sell off their country's resources for their country's reins. That's always a thriving industry, but Greene ain't much of a black hat. So another fine actor, Mathieu Amalric, also goes wasted, scaring no one with his Peter Lorre eyes.

As for the principal babe, that would be Camille (Olga Kurylenko), she of the badly burned back but the very fetching front. Alas, there's nary a bonding to be seen with this Bond girl - both parties are too busy miring themselves in their vengeance-is-mine misery. Admittedly, another femme offers the sensually minded a brief flutter of hopper. A full hour into the sober proceedings, Miss Fields (Gemma Arterton) inspires James to make his first and only joke; minutes later, he's shirtless, she's clad in a towel, and we're flirting with optimism. Alas, it isn't meant to be. The damsel quickly comes to a sad end, coated not in yesterday's gold but in today's equivalent. Let's just say that, at our last glance of her naked torso, there's plenty of oil but absolutely no drilling.

Meanwhile, the moody one is running up the kill count, using his bare hands when bullets won't do, then blithely tossing the victims, friend or foe, off tall buildings and into squat dumpsters. Lest we miss the point, Judi Dench's M is on hand to document the obvious with her typical candour: "I think you are so blinded by inconsolable rage that you don't care who you hurt." Oh, he will, if the biggest hurt is to the box office, which may explain why M keeps trying to jimmy James back to some alignment with his former self, the old charmer with a rebel's cause. Really, this time, she's playing Auntie Mame to his anti-hero.

And the notable exception? A terrific sequence set in an Austrian opera house where Forster, slowing the pace and rhythm for once, intercuts between Tosca performed on stage and the Bond narrative in the wings, and the two grim tales momentarily collude, one spectacle reinforcing the other. Only problem is, Puccini's music doubles as a shining example and a stern caution: If the ambitious goal is to make tragedy consoling, to infuse it with a quantum of solace, only art will do the trick. Anything less and you're left neither shaken nor stirred, with nothing to feel but bored.