| Quantum of Solace [DVD] [2008] | ![Quantum of Solace [DVD] [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511Es1vxmyL._SL160_.jpg)
| Director: Marc Forster
Actors: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini
Studio: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Category: DVD
List Price: £24.99
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Rating:  383 reviews
Format: Anamorphic, PAL
Languages: English (Subtitles For The Hearing Impaired), German (Subtitles For The Hearing Impaired), English (Subtitled), Danish (Subtitled), Finnish (Subtitled), Swedish (Subtitled), Norwegian (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Italian (Subtitled), German (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), Portuguese (Subtitled), Icelandic (Subtitled), Greek (Subtitled), English (Audio Description)
Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
Region: 2
Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 2.40:1
Number Of Discs: 2
Running Time: 100 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.7
EAN: 5039036040730
ASIN: B001QE1BDY
Theatrical Release Date: 2008
Release Date: March 23, 2009
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
Daniel Craig hasn't lost a step since Casino Royale--this James Bond remains dangerous, a man who could earn that license to kill in brutal hand-to-hand combat⦠but still look sharp in a tailored suit. And Quantum of Solance itself carries on from the previous film like no other 007 movie, with Bond nursing his anger from the Casino Royale storyline and vowing blood revenge on those responsible. For the new plot, we have villain Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), intent on controlling the water rights in impoverished Third World nations and happy to overthrow a dictator or two to get his way. Olga Kurylenko is very much in the "Bond girl" tradition, but in the Ursula Andress way, not the Denise Richards way. And Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, and Giancarlo Giannini are welcome holdovers. If director Marc Forster and the longtime Bond production team seem a little too eager to embrace the continuity-shredding style of the Bourne pictures (especially in a nearly incomprehensible opening car chase), they nevertheless quiet down and get into a dark, concentrated groove soon enough. And the theme song, "Another Way to Die," penned by Jack White and performed by him and Alicia Keys, is actually good (at times Keys seems to be channeling Shirley Bassey--nice). Of course it all comes down to Craig. And he kills. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com
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| Customer Reviews:
 Casino Royale: Act Two February 17, 2009
T. Scott (Yorkshire, UK)
84 out of 94 found this review helpful
Let's be honest, everyone has an opinion on what a Bond film should be like. In terms of 'I would have done it this way' or 'they shouldn't have done it like that' a Bond film ranks up there with how the country should be run or the management of the national football team where everyone is an expert. Too much sex, not enough glamour, ridiculous gadgets, not enough gadgets, the stunts are too far fetched, it's too realistic....and so on; whatever combination the producers put in their films they'd be criticised for any of the above.
Quantum of Solace is no different, whilst still hugely successful Marc Forster's film has split audiences and critics alike. The storyline sees Bond pursuing the organisation he holds responsible for the death of his love Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. It turns out that this organisation, Quantum, is unknown to MI6 yet is highly powerful and internationally connected and Bond stumbles on its plot to control Bolivia's water supply. Like M, we are never quite sure if Bond is on the mission or pursuing his personal agenda, as he gives little away whilst displaying his resourcefulness in following various leads around the world.
Quantum of Solace starts half an hour after Casino Royale and immediately you are into the film. An exhilarating car chase by Lake Garda is followed by an innovative title sequence and then we have a bit of exposition from M before another chase ensues, this time by foot and before you notice twenty minutes have passed and you haven't breathed. The plot proceeds more like a sequence of events as opposed to a structured build-up as Bond, hopping countries, goes from one chase (land, sea and air) or fight to the next, with just enough dialogue in between to balance the tempo. Following the predictably explosive third act the film's final scene lets the audience take stock and breathe out.
The reoccurring criticism levied at Quantum of Solace is its lack of build-up and depth, with Bond too solemn throughout. For me this misses the point, as producers were at pains to point out that this is a direct sequel to Casino Royale. I would go a step further and add that it's actually Act Two of one big film; where Casino Royale is the prelude and Quantum of Solace the finale where Bond, angry, lets loose. Viewing it this way will give you a different perspective.
There are a few downsides. The premise of a secret organisation whose evil aim is to up the price of water is, if not far fetched for today's audience, hardly blood-curdling stuff. And insisting on an explosive denouement is one thing, but to achieve it by having the enemies clash in a hotel powered by ultra flammable pressurised gas is, to say the least, a bit contrived.
The upsides though are many. The action is superb (if a little Bourne-juddery at times) as are the several fight sequences. You actually believe Bond is a highly trained killer and your expectancy doesn't let you blink when he gets into a clash (do you remember watching the Roger Moore fights slightly embarrassed?). The cinematography may not fully capture the pseudo glamour of the Bond countries of old, but you really feel you are in these places with Bond, sharing his claustrophobic world. And I loved the odd retro touch the film endows such as where Bond, all stealth and dressed like Steve McQueen, sneaks around a seedy Bolivian town in the dead of night and actually uses a public telephone.
The characters are mostly all well played too. The highlights being Gemma Arterton's breath of fresh air as Miss Fields and Jeffrey Wright's brooding Felix Leiter. But the plaudits have to go to Judy Dench and Daniel Craig who are both class acts. Whilst deadly serious, Craig delivers his witticisms with perfect timing and reassuring arrogance with a healthy disregard for authority. And the chemistry he shares with Dench's maternal, eternally reproachful M can't be faked.
All said and done Quantum of Solace is a hugely enjoyable film. It might not have the suave assuredness of the Connery films, nor the glamour of the some of the Moore's but what it has is Daniel Craig who, and this is coming from a lifelong Connery fan, is hands-down the best Bond of the series.
Not A Patch on "Casino Royale" March 22, 2009
A. Mcalinden (Berkshire, UK)
34 out of 39 found this review helpful
Reading through the existing reviews, they appear to fall into two camps. Negative ones complain about the lack of Q, Moneypenny, and the saucy quips of Roger and Pierce. Positive ones invoke Ian Fleming, and reckon he'd love "Quantum of Solace".
Actually - no he wouldn't - because QoS the film is a total mess. I'm aware that it's a direct sequel to "Casino Royale", which makes the comparison all the more stark. CR is the definitive Bond film because it is a supremely classy piece of cinema that stood comparison with the best grown-up films released in 2006. It has at its heart that superb performance from Daniel Craig as 007. There is action in abundance, beautifully shot with a minimum of CGI and with a clarity and flow of editing that makes following the plot a breezy pleasure.
QoS. Is chopped. Up into tiny. Snippets. As the inexperienced. Director. More famiiar with. Emotional material such as. "The Kite Runner". Hasn't. The Foggiest Notion how. Action Scenes should be. Shot. And. More. Importantly Edited.
Craig can't take the blame, there's nothing wrong with his steely, driven, performance. And he's ably supported - Dench is wonderful as ever and Bond Girl Kurylenko equips herself well in scenes where the pacing slows down. The stunt work is able, a shame we couldn't take more time to enjoy it.
A massive opportunity squandered after the genius of CR, then, but three stars because it's still James Bond.
"You Don't Have To Worry About Me..." May 27, 2009
Mark Barry at Reckless Records, London (UK)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
If I were to nail down what's wrong with "Quantum Of Solace" in a single word - it would be "cold". Bond used to be fun, Bond used to be entertaining, Bond used to grab you by the short and curlies and pleasure the engorged gonads off you for the allotted two hours it was given. And it never failed. Even the worst Roger Moore dreck of the late 1970's had something that encouraged repeat viewing. But on Bond 22 - you're bored half way through it and by the predicable end not much has changed.
I suppose after 22 films about the same thing, you're bound to have a case of diminishing returns, but there are times on "Quantum" where you have a shocking sense of pointlessness. Marc Forster directs chase sequences that feel contrived and have been done so much better before either in previous Bond films or others (principally Bourne). You feel like your watching Alien 3 - made by some inexperienced buck that made videos for a living. And don't get me started on the crap song and the woeful opening credits that were clearly a hurried last minute thing.
The opening car chase is the first offender. At the cinema, I along with others couldn't believe they'd do this - when you think of how Bourne simply nailed that - this Italian sequence is workmanlike at best. It should have opened with a reconfigured flashback sequence that included the car chase, the interrogation scene (how they got there) and then ended in the chase across the rooftops and the fabulous hand-to-hand fight sequence in the scaffolding afterwards (one of the films best moments) - all very Bond.
You have to feel sorry for Craig too - who seems to be putting in twice the effort for half the return. There is also a worrying ongoing lack of chemistry between him and Judy Dench who quite clearly pines for Brosnan to return - an actor who could convey both charm and edge in equal abundance and was comfortable as Bond and evolved as him.
It would of course be easy to blame Daniel Craig as the lead - I don't. It isn't that his Bond is charmless by choice, it's that he's being forced to be that way. Check out Craig's acting chops in "Flashbacks Of A Fool" or "The Mother" or "Defiance" - he's absolutely riveting and brilliant in all three - displaying all manner of emotion - shockingly good when given the material. But the under-worked script of "Solace" has straight-jacketed his version of 007 into a particularly nasty corner. It's far 'too' hard-edged and has left him with little or no room for acting manoeuvre. He isn't warm towards anyone - especially women - and his character needs to be.
The dispatching of Gemma Arterton's character Fields in black oil (aping the famous Goldfinger scene) is perhaps the crassest moment ever in a Bond film and a huge mistake. Her character could have died in a far more interesting and brave way - letting Craig and Kurylenko get away - but no - this is a man's movie made by men who have no interest in women.
After Mads Mikkelsen's fabulous and believable turn as the card-playing Le Chiffre in "Casino Royale", Mathieu Amalric is just hopeless as Dominic Greene - one of the most insipid bad guys ever - about as frightening as a teddy bear with a wonky eye. His expressions of anger and hate in the opera scene when Bond outs The Quantum group are just laughable. Bond's feisty companion Camille played by the truly gorgeous Olga Kurylenko is a smart choice as a leading lady, but she gets little to work with. Both the tremendously likeable Giancarlo Giannini and Jeffrey Wright as René Mathis (police chief ally in Casino Royale) and Felix Leiter (his CIA buddy) distinguish themselves, but again Rene is disposed off in a cold and crass way. And on it goes to the inevitable mega-explosive ending...
Then there's the Blu Ray itself - the picture quality is gorgeous as you would imagine, but the menu is irritating to navigate - the interviews use the same Daniel Craig footage almost three times where he looks tired and bored rigid and again utterly charmless. And you finish watching them very quickly indeed. Again you just know there's more - and sure enough - sometime in 2009 - the inevitable 2-Disc Ultimate Edition to fleece fans will appear.
It isn't that "Quantum" is really, really bad - it just that it isn't that good either. I can't see myself looking at it again and that's almost unforgivable after the out-and-out triumph of its predecessor. The makers need to go back to the drawing board and lighten up big time, because this is a very disappointing and dreary chapter in one of the most cherishable film franchises in history.
Bond tells M in one of their spiked conversations, "You don't have to worry about me..." but on the strength of this and hundreds of other 3-star (and less) reviews - we clearly do.
In the words of Gerry Rafferty boys, "Get It Right The Next Time"...
We might just be entering a genuine second golden age of Bond films June 14, 2009
Trevor Willsmer (London, England)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'll admit that I went into Quantum of Solace more or less dreading a repeat of the Licence To Kill debacle. All the danger signs were there - a rushed script because of a writers' strike, threats of Bond going rogue again plus the problem that great Bond films are usually followed by naff ones. The short running time wasn't encouraging, nor the bigger budget and promise of more action.
Well, this isn't one of the great Bond films, and Casino Royale set the bar far too high for it to compete. But it's certainly not a disappointment if you go in aware of that, and more gratifyingly, the similarities to Licence To Kill are superficial. Where Casino Royale was like making love all night long, this is more of a gratifyingly frenzied *beep* of a film. The running time isn't a problem because, like From Russia With Love, this is a pared down machine with no fat to trim away, throwing out all the overused touchstones to get down to business. From a plot point of view there's maybe a little too much one corpse leading to the next plot point in the first third, but the film wisely ditches that approach early.
Dan Bradley's action scenes are thankfully not as ineptly over-edited and incoherent as in Paul Greengrass' films, but aren't as impressive as Gary Powell's work on Casino Royale. There are moments of familiarity - a motorbike sequence borrows from the unimpressively shot harbour scene in Jackie Chan's The Protector, but without the lethargic pacing, while an aeriel dogfight owes a lot to a famously rejected stunt originally intended for the opening of GoldenEye - and the opening car chase through heavy traffic could have benefited from not trying quite so hard. But within them there are moments of stylisation that few other Bonds have attempted and failed at but which are far more successful here, most notably an impressive opera sequence that could have done with a few more shots to clarify the odd mechanical detail (something other parts of the film could benefit from). It's also surprisingly vicious - for perhaps the first time in a Bond film, innocent bystanders are deliberately killed. That said, the rationale for the explosions at the end is more than a little dubious.
The film isn't as humorless as some have complained: there's a lot of dry humor where appropriate and a delightfully playful game of cat-and-mouse with Bond and M in a hotel, but none of the outright slapstick comedy that dragged the series down before. Nor is Forster's direction or the editing as awkward as some found it: there's a pleasingly epic scale to the film allied with a non-nonsense straight-down-to-business attitude that works well for this particular story.
The most curious complaint is that it's just action with no character development, when nothing could be further from the truth. While there is more action, the characterisation is integrated into both plot and action. Bond is once again on an emotional journey - forgiveness, believe it or not, is ultimately the quantum of solace of the title - though this time the heart and soul of the film is Giancarlo Giannini's Rene Mathis, the kind of man Bond might be capable of becoming and one he learns something about himself from. One of their scenes is easily one of the very finest moments in the entire history of the series.
Craig still owns the role impressively and Jeffrey Wright starts to come in to his own as Felix Leiter this time round. Mathieu Amalric is one of the better villains of the past twenty years. He won't be among the greats, but he convinces and the scheme is genuinely ingenious in its simplicity. Olga Kurylenko manages to shake off the ineptness of her former performances to be a more than adequate but not especially memorable female lead, though Gemma Arterton lets the side down badly in a part that has unwelcome elements of Serena Gordon in GoldenEye and Rowan Atkinson in Never Say Never Again. Thankfully it's a small role so her weak and stilted straight-out-of-stage-school acting can't do too much damage.
Intriguingly, the film exists in a more convincing world of global politics than we've seen before in a Bond film: SPECTRE would have loved to be around in an era when governments eagerly step into bed with crime syndicates if it suits their ends and where corporations are able to play governments and intelligence agencies against each other. Here Bond works for a British government that tortures suspects on foreign soil and blindly goes along with foreign interests and crime syndicates alike in its desperation to snatch the scraps from the superpowers' tables. Initially, Bond is just as ruthless and morally flawed as his masters, the bullish arrogance gradually being smoothed away by emotional experience as he learns the importance of forgiveness to find the quantum of solace of the title that he needs to go on.
Yes, there are weaknesses - M's office is overdesigned, a few scenes could have played better with more time, the Goldfinger reference is unnecessary, the song is crap and the gunbarrel sequence is a big and unnecessary mistake - but it's not the crushing disappointment some are claiming. It may not be a great Bond movie, but it most definitely is a Bond movie, and a damn good night out at the pictures. And one that left me seriously thinking that even if the series never recaptures the high of Casino Royale,we may just be entering a genuine second golden age of Bond movies.
The extras package on this initial 2-disc set isn't quite as bad as some make out, but it's clearly a stopgap until the inevitable 3-disc set comes out shortly before the next Bond film makes its bow. There's certainly nothing to get too excited about - the half-hour On Location featurette aired on TV at least three times last winter, the 43-minutes of brief crew interviews were on the net while the five short featurettes fee like electronic press kit packages. The terrible music video for the terrible title song and two trailers for the film are also included.
Better on Blu Ray than in the cinema June 3, 2009
Kenneth F. Mcara (Dundee, Scotland)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
When we saw this in the cinema, the first 20-or-so minutes were the most uncomfortable in my film-going career as the relatively grainy picture and the rapid jump-cutting during action sequences made it almost impossible to watch.
Seeing it on Blu Ray, however, is like seeing a completely different film. The image is sharp, and the action is exciting and involving. Whilst I would acknowledge that this is certainly not the finest Bond film, I seem to have enjoyed it more than some of the other reviewers on this site, and feel that it had its moments, particularly in the sequence during the performance of Tosca at the Bregenz opera when the action is played out against the music which closes Act 2 once the heroine has despatched Scarpia with a knife. This was beautifully done.
I like to think of this film as a transitional one, between the raw "double-o" agent of Casino Royale [Blu-ray] [2006] and the (we hope) more mature, less vindictive Bond of films to come. It's Bond's equivalent of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Extended Edition) [DVD] [2002] which my wife described as mostly consisting of running and fighting...
Better things to come, I'm sure, and this rather cold film may eventually form a natural part of a longer story-arc for Bond, with Quantum taking the place of Fleming's SPECTRE or SMERSH.
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