Quantum of Solace/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Broken Base: The theme song. And the movie itself.
  • Complete Monster: General Medrano, who rapes and kills Camille's family in front of her, and burns down the entire house. His Karmic Death is well deserved.
  • Critical Dissonance: Big time!
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Mr. White. In this film and Casino Royale, the character has more Crowning Moments of Awesome in his limited screen time than the two villains of both films combined. Also, Mathis qualifies with his role as aide and confidante to Craig's Bond in Casino Royale. Here, he is willing to work with Bond again after being accused of The Mole in the last film.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks: A major complaint was being a grittier retread of Casino Royale.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Dominic Greene might be a thoroughly nasty piece of work but he's a master manipulator and has balls of steel! He even manages to taunt Bond while being dangled over a raging inferno.
    • Ensemble Darkhorse Mr White as well. He is perfectly calm when taken to MI 6 headquarters, kills Le Chiffre's henchmen, and has his brilliant moment during the Tosca scene.
  • Moral Event Horizon: After Medrano tries to rape the hostess, there's really no way his Karmic Death can be too harsh. Although from Camille's backstory, one suspects that Medrano has made crossing the Moral Event Horizon into a career.
  • Narm:
    • Dominick Greene when he goes Axe Crazy.
    • "Please do not talk to me like I'm 'ZHUTPID!!!'
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: Averted, with a solid, if not particularly inspired, FPS. The PlayStation 2 version is a TPS, and the DS is hard to describe. Incidentally, the Next-Gen and PC versions were done by Treyarch.
  • Random Events Plot: The film had as much happening in it as Casino Royale, but was almost 40 minutes shorter. The problem was that Casino Royale only narrowly averted this itself, thus making Quantum of Solace very difficult to follow.
  • Reconstruction: On the surface, Quantum of Solace is much more like a typical Bond film than Casino Royale (arguably a Deconstruction as much as an origin story). But this one folds all the elements introducted in Casino Royale into the formula: the Stale Beer elements, Bond's rough-and-tumble approach, the emphasis on characterisation in the script.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Hey, who knew that Kate Beckett had been a Canadian secret agent before joining the NYPD?
  • Romantic Plot Tumor: Averted. Camille doesn't get with Bond at the end, even though she had better chemistry with him than many previous leading ladies.
  • Squick: When Greene splits his own foot with the axe.
  • Tear Jerker:
  • Theiss Titillation Theory: See (Vapor Wear) example.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • The film is controversial all the way through to many, but the main plot points - Bond trying to find Yusef, Greene's plot, what Quantum is, etc - are quite strong. However, Quantum of Solace's short running time and it's quick pace means that none of this gets developed.
    • Yet. It would appear, based on the Craig movies so far, that the Bond writers are looking to write something more long-term, where instead of wrapping up all the loose ends by the end of the film, as previous Bond movies have, they're content to let several elements remain unresolved so that Bond's quest will continue, and maintain some continuity. Casino Royale introduced a larger conspiracy, which is expanded upon in Quantum Of Solace. However, there's no doubt that the Quantum organization, while foiled in one operation, is still out there, and the overarching conspiracy remains in play.