Quantum of Solace

Sony. Ford. Range Rover. Virgin Atlantic. Sony. Sony. More Sony. That’s right folks, it’s another round of blatant product placement, so that can only mean it’s time for another James Bond film *sigh*, but I’ll try to resist the urge to drone on about that.

Quantum of Solace is the latest 007 outing, and it’s a direct follow on from Casino Royale. Meeester Bond is now after a bit of revenge and he quickly gets to work hunting down unknown people in an unknown organisation, who do, well, unknown things. In other words, there’s some unknown unknowns and even a few known unknowns that Donald Rumsfeld would’ve been proud of. One of the known knowns is that all the unknown unknowns are all very bad, mmmkay, so it’s important that they’re all killed. Hopefully that’s all nice and clear now.

Peruvian guinea pig wig product placement

Throw in a shed load of action and that pretty much covers the first half of the film. It’s pretty action heavy, but should you get bored during the bits inbetween you can always fall back on a nice game of ‘Spot the Sony Logo’ (whoops, I said I wouldn’t mention that).

Anyway, we eventually learn that this dastardly unknown outfit are actually hoarding water, so they can sell it later at an extortionate price. Oh no!!!

Hang on, wait a second, sort of… Water Rustling?

That’s not very exciting is it? And that’s one of the main problems. While Quantum of Solace is a solid action flick, the overall plot just isn’t that good. Most of the action sequences are also shot in wobbly close-up, so it’s sometimes difficult to actually tell what’s happening. It took me a minute or so to work out who was chasing who in the pre-title sequence and I’ve still no idea how Bond made that enemy speed boat do that flip thing with just a bit of rope to hand.

Oh, and I swear when the waitress is struggling on the bed whilst resisting the intentions of the General, you see a quick glimpse of her clunge. There you go… it’s not all bad then.

6.5/10.

Burn After Reading

Richard Wilson? I don't believe it!

I wasn’t much looking forward to watching Burn After Reading the other day. Any film that gets described as being “not as good as The Big Lebowski”, a comparison against one of the most overrated films of all time isn’t much of an endorsement to me. Anyhow, no worries, it was still good to get back in the cinema swing again after a bit of a break.

The plot revolves around a bunch of characters with lives all crossing at some point, so I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say there are some incompetent CIA agents, some even more incompetent gym employees and other people who get conveniently confused and/or jump to wrong conclusions. You get the idea. Oh, and pretty much everyone is sleeping with the other characters to form some weird love-parallalagram. All sounds a bit Carry On, doesn’t it?

More importantly, is it any good?

Well, it’s watchable and I didn’t dislike it as much as I thought I perhaps would, but that’s about as enthusiastic as I can get. For a comedy, it barely raised more than a smile. Plus for a film that is only just over an hour and a half long it seemed an awful lot longer. Brad Pitt’s character was good, and shit, but I really can’t bring myself to give Burn After Reading anything more than 5/10.

Or is that too generous?