I’ve not much liked the James Bond flicks over the years; the comic adventure genre rarely appeals to me. Yet I liked Casino Royale. Director Martin Campbell gave the film depth and intelligence and Daniel Craig filled the more refined role well. But Quantum of Solace, with director Campbell replaced by Marc Forster, is disappointing.

The plot is thin. The action scenes are over-edited. There are so many cuts from view to view that its very difficult to follow. In one sequence it took quite while figure out whether Bond was pursuer or being pursued. The song over the opening titles is awful, a much-too-loud harsh squalling cacophony that has nothing to do with anything. I put my fingers in my ears.

As David Stratton writes in The Australian,

after a while, all the chase sequences blur into one: there are speeding cars and trucks alongside Lake Garda, speeding boats in the harbour of Port au Prince, speeding men on the rooftops of Siena, the latter scene remarkably similar to the one involving Jason Bourne on the rooftops of Tangier in The Bourne Ultimatum. These scenes aren’t badly handled; it’s just that, like the Bourne films, they’re over-edited to the point where they are actually confusing. Quantum of Solace editors Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson worked on the Bourne films, too, and it’s hard to escape the impression that the producers at Eon are trying to turn Bond into another Bourne, which would be a big mistake.

Craig does his best with this mess. He’s blue-eyed and sexy (and fully clothed for all but a couple of seconds). His Bond is haunted, intense and loyal. Judi Dench gets all the best lines and M. Mathieu Almaric is fine as the villian, Dominic Greene, but we only see one side of his character, the sleazy side.