MOVIE REVIEW: "Quantum Of Solace"

DANIEL CRAIG'S (or his stuntman's/men's) LEGS ARE AT LEAST AS USEFUL as his arms. Maybe more. Everyone knows it's the arms that get life done, while legs aren't good for much beyond getting you around and kicking toilet seats up. But throughout this movie all four of his limbs are in an almost non-stop flurry of kicking and punching and jumping and dangling off buses and booting corpses aside. He reminds me of that creature Lisa Simpson saw while hallucinating in the dentist's chair that was basically a pair of legs on top of another pair of legs, and it would flip over and over again in place. Action from up top AND down bottom. The same goes for at least half of the cast: it's two hours of apes in tailored suits hopping all over buildings like kids playing Spiderman on monkeybars and doing tons of stunts that are obviously completely physically impossible and incapable of happening. Which doubtless explains the two serious injuries that happened during shooting.

So obviously, a wonderful movie. James Bond knocks off twenty-two well-armed killers with a flyswatter, adjusts his tie, and downs a fifth of cognac in exotic locales across the globe. Quantum was shot on quasi-location, Chile and Panama filling in for Bolivia and Haiti respectively, so you only occasionally have those moments when you feel like what you're seeing onscreen is actually happening in a soundstage in Burbank with a catering truck in the parking lot. And those are due to some unrelated tacky touches, like the requisite villain of obscure European origin and South African accent (here played by the creepy short guy from Munich), a few questionable lines (is there actually such a thing as "Canadian intelligence"?), and some horribly placed product placement (isn't Ford going out of business anyway?). Jeffrey Wright excels as possibly the most grizzled spy in movie history. Everyone is trying to simultaneously shoot and fuck each other. And now all I want to do is stand in a pristine hotel lobby in a fine suit, murmuring priceless information to shadowy "contacts" before making a hilariously dry remark and retiring to my hotel suite to make love to a model/spy.

And man oh man, what love it would be. Now I have an answer for people who ask me which celebrity I think is hottest. Olga Kurylenko. Just imagine this piece of work rolling up on you in the street and telling you to jump in in a bad Bolivian accent. I don't think even the women would be mad at that.