quantum of solace

erm, whut?

The first outing for Daniel Craig's bond was something of a breath of fresh air.

Gone were the likes of Bond coolly dispatching the baddies without breaking a sweat and then delivering a witty one-liner. In came Bond getting nearly as beat up as the bad guy and not saying anything.

The Bond-girls remained, but they were sassy and feisty and Bond even fell in love with one of them. The flash car's also remained, but the weird gadgets were either gone altogether or massively toned down. Indeed, in an age where a phone can provide you with anything from e-mail to a GPS mapping tool, who really needs gadgets?

No, this was gritty, realistic (some may argue Jason Bourne inspired) Bond.

The second out for Craig as Bond is also something completely new - a direct sequel. This one follows on from the first film by perhaps as little as ten minutes.

It also keeps going with the other stuff - beat-up Bond, more realistic, no daft gadgets, feisty Bond girls.

Only that's where it kinda starts to crack. There are two Bond girls. The first is not really a new-mould Bond girl in that she doesn't really kick arse - she's a bit more ditsy and dainty. Bond also beds her in no seconds flat. But he doesn't care for her - she's bumped off and he hardly bats an eyelid.

So back to old-skool Bond then? Well, no. I mean, she doesn't have a double-entendre for a name for example. She also serves very little purpose - he doesn't bed her to get info like he used to bed Bond girls.

The second Bond girl is much more feisty. But she's also kinda incidental again. Plus he doesn't bed her and again, no silly name.

It's a very good example of what's wrong with the film - it's like they've tried to slip in a little flavour of old-skool Bond, but not got it right.

What makes this worse is that they've tried to also keep some of the new stuff that just doesn't mesh well with the old stuff. So, for example, you get new-style realistic fist-fights, but then there's a bit with a plane dog-fight that's right out of old Bond and is very unrealistic.

What compounds all of this is the film is very confusing. I'm still not 100% sure quite what was going on.

The only real plot seems to be that Bond is seeking revenge. The trouble is that he could have had revenge very quickly, but instead waits for no apparent reason. I guess it was because he was trying to uncover... I dunno, something about this big conspiratorial network of bad guys thing.

But they're so ephemeral and without substance it's impossible to get your teeth into. Even at the end you realise that the bad guy who Bond's been after clearly isn't the head of the organisation. So does that mean we're going to get another sequel?

In a way it just felt like an excuse to hang a bunch of cool action sequences off of.

That could have worked, but what made it less satisfying was how it was shot - the camera was all over the place and it tended to get really confusing really quickly.

I dunno - it was like they were tying to have their cake and eat it. Only the cake was half chocolate and half baked Alaska, so it gave a funny sort of texture in the mouth.