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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-03-23
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 100 minutes

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

DVD Description
Disc One • “Another Way To Die” Music Video • Theatrical and Teaser Trailers

Disc Two • Bond on Location Featurette • Start of Shooting Featurette • On Location Featurette • Olga Kurylenko and the Boat Chase Featurette • Director Marc Forster Featurette • The Music Featurette • Crew Files Behind-the-Scenes Clips

Synopsis
Daniel Craig returns as Ian Fleming's most famous creation in Quantum of Solace, the first film in the James Bond series to follow directly on from the previous entry. Continuing where Casino Royale concluded, Quantum of Solace finds Bond on a perilous mission to uncover the truth behind the betrayal of his beloved Vesper, while keeping one step ahead of M (Judi Dench – Mrs Henderson Presents, Shakespeare In Love), the CIA and a shadowy organisation fronted by the diabolical Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric – The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Marie Antoinette).

Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright – Basquiat, Oliver Stone's W) and the dubious Rene Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini – Black Belly of the Tarantula, Seven Beauties) also return for this high octane sequel directed by internationally-renowned German filmmaker Marc Forster (The Kite Runner, Finding Neverland). Though Quantum of Solace takes its gritty and uncompromising lead from Casino Royale, many of the series' hallmark ingredients are present, including a bevy of beautiful women which includes Gemma Arterton (St Trinians, Rocknrolla) and Olga Kurylenko (Le Serpent, Hitman), and a post-modern music score from series veteran David Arnold.

Stills from Quantum of Solace (click for larger image).

James Bond returns	Judi Dench as ‘M’	Olga Kurylenko
Mathieu Almaric	Judi Dench, Jesper Christensen and Daniel Craig	Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter
Olga Kurylenko	Giancarlo Giannini as Mathis	Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright
Jeffrey Wright and Daniel Craig	Olga Kurylenko

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Customer Reviews

Casino Royale: Act Two
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. A 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.

Fantastic and sadly underated film.
The Bond franchise has taken a bold but timely step in attempting to bring Bond into the twenty first century - a step which, not surprisingly has many die-hards throwing up their hands in horror as the security blankets of pretty boy actor, cure-all gadgets and evil megalomaniac have been mostly dumped. But I firmly believe that in doing so the quality of the films has undergone a massive improvement. We no longer, as a society, believe that the 'enemy' is external to us, can be plausibly personified as single rogue dictators somewhere else, that all the problems of the world can be solved by science or that appearance is truth. So watching the old Bond films with their facile certainties and glossy escapism has no resonances with our more complex modern paranoias. It is this culture gap which the new Bond films address, and they do this brilliantly.

We know that this film is part 2 of the story begun in Casino Royale. In Quantum of Solace, the psychological journey of the MI6 hit man reaches its denoument. To paraphrase Vesper Lynd, he is a maladjusted young man who gives little thought to sacrificing others for queen and country. He is a man whose only fully developed emotion is loyalty, whose ambition is to be an efficient killer, who looks for no moral high ground other than that of complete faith. But he is also a man who has discovered that, after all, he is able to love a woman, to contemplate a life within society rather than one only on its fringes. This inchoate emotional development is aborted by Vesper's betrayal and death. What now? This is the psychological point at which Quantum of Solace opens. The much berated opening scene is I think the first of a series of brilliant metaphors of Bond's internal landscape. The horrifying recklessness and fury of the driving sequence shows you exactly what he feels. The roughness of the editing reinforces this. The next scene of Bond as torturer forces the viewer to remember what he really is, what's been at stake here - a human life or an inhuman one. In this film we get to see his internal landscape - the desert scenes are particularly fine for this - and to follow him all the way through to a delicate resolution - the understanding that loyalty and betrayal are intertwined, provisional, uncertain categories, not the mutually exclusive ones that MI6 has a vested interest in training its agents to believe they are. Note the plays on this theme: the MI6 rogue agent earning money on the side, the betrayal of Felix Leiter by his own boss, the admissions that rendition occurs, M's unheeded warnings to the home office minister that Britain is doing business with a terrorist organisation - guilt is spilled right across society.

Yes, the plot is a little complicated, not just a series of action sequences punctuated by naked girls or corpses (or the corpses of naked girls) but this reflects a sort of lurching both psychologically and also, one imagines,the reality of following slender leads against the grain in a complex investigation.

The detail is superb. For example, Bond cannot speak Vesper's name until the final scene. This omission is subtle, yet suggests unarticulable loss. Naming her at the end signals that his Herculean struggle to resolve and understand the contradictions is coming to an end.

This is a stunning, carefully composed, meaty film. For the first time we have an emotionally and psychologically coherent Bond. Daniel Craig is an extremely fine and sensitive actor (watch his face when he is being counselled by Mathis, his alternative future self, on the flight to Bolivia). In fact watch the film again, carefully. The mise en scene alone justifies a whole viewing. It stands up to all kinds of scrutiny and has interesting things to say about the modern dismay about the integration of 'enemy' with self.

We might just be entering a genuine second golden age of Bond films
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.