Quantum of Disappointment

I don't often review films, but I think someone has to cut through the sycophantic hype and say it: Quantum of Solace is c**p.

This isn't a Bond film, it's like a bad entry in the Bourne series. Where is the elegance, the charm we should expect of Bond?

Bond films have always traditionally leavened the action with humour and beauty. Both were spectacularly missing from this episode. The only two attractive locations - Siena during The Palio and an opera house in Austria were totally wasted, being neither an attractive backdrop nor properly integrated into the story. With the single exception of Gemma Atherton's party dress, all the women looked like they had been clothed at a run-down Oxfam shop.

This shortest of Bond films has suffered from editing down to a frenetic rush in which neither the plot nor the action can be followed. The best action scenes, like the best music, have just enough space to allow the mind to catch up, time to think "He's not going to...?" or "My God, he just ...!" Without sufficient space, these action scenes were almost impossible to parse properly, and ended up a blur.

Daniel Craig is playing Bond as a vicious thug. This worked in Casino Royale, set as a prequel to Bond's real career, but won't be sustainable. This Bond is neither as likeable as Moore and Brosnan made him, nor as tough as Connery and Dalton, nor does he have the emotional depth that this story required - something Lazenby or Dalton could easily have delivered.

That said, I thought the story worked, but I seem to be in a small minority who managed to follow it through the film's poor editing and appalling diction. Maybe having recently read a National Geographic article on the Bolivia of Eduardo Morales helped... Still, I prefer my Bond villains to have a tad more ambition - exploiting the water rights in South America's poorest country is a poor substitute for world domination, and the characters of Greene and Medrano looked rather like poor copies of the two baddies in Sahara.

Another poor copy was Gemma Atherton's demise. In Goldfinger, Shirley Eaton's death is an extension of an established Goldfinger fetish, and helps to develop both his character and others. Here, the dead girl covered in oil was simply gratuitous, and bore no relation to the rest of the story.

Bond films should be rich in gadgets, girls and stunts, but this one failed to deliver. The first two were almost entirely absent: a clever mobile phone is simply no longer special, and Craig's Bond seems to have developed a politically correct blindness to the ladies. More importantly the film also lacked any single memorable stunt, something which has often rescued weaker films in the series (the car jump in The Man With The Golden Gun springs immediately to mind). In these difficult times, a little patriotic flourish such as the famous Union Jack parachute would have lifted the spirits, but again the film failed to deliver.

Musically, the film was dominated by the repetitive strumming which unfortunately seems to be de rigeur for current action films and TV. The lack of broad sweeps of scenery or action prevented David Arnold from doing what he does best: grand orchestral themes. Instead he was obviously allowed to do something he does much less well, choosing the title song. He appears to be deaf to singers with inadequate technique and range, and the result is another shouty, strained and instantly forgettable theme. Emma Bunton and Beyonce have demonstrated that it's still perfectly possible to write a proper "Bond theme" and find a popular artiste to sing it strongly but tunefully. Why can't we have one for the film?

The producers need to take more care of their franchise. Bond is not Bourne or Bauer, and must be portrayed with flair and panache. This is the worst Bond since Moonraker, and challenges it for top slot. It is Hollywood's great shame that none of the better Bonds has won an Oscar. The danger is that they might give this its Raspberry.