(2008) First, buckle your seat belt for a harrowing, furious car chase - James Bond (Daniel Craig) in his Aston Martin DBS pursued by bad guys - along a winding coastal road in Italy, followed by a foot race - Bond hotfooting it after another bad guy - through a tunnel and across rooftops in Siena, as a horse race takes place below. The latter takes place after delivery of 007's captive to M (Judi Dench) for interrogation and extraordinary rendition, but the bad guys have a plant deep inside M's team. "The first thing you should know about us," says Mr White, "is that we have people everywhere."

Director Marc Forster's shapely, action-stacked feature - the 23rd in the series of Bond movies and first as a sequel (to Casino Royale without flashback) - is a race across land, sea, and sky, as well as against time (at 106 minutes, the shortest of the franchise built on Ian Fleming's novels), like a fast-food feast consumed on the run.

Second, flesh is almost all in the front of the flick, exposed in the shifting sands of the opening credits: bare babes and bullets bearing down. Bond's all business in this brisk bullet and bang.

Back to London where M cautions Bond about keeping his focus on the mission apart from any desire for revenge (recall Vesper Lynd's death in Casino Royale), though she confides to another: "It'd be a pretty cold bastard who didn't want revenge for the death of someone he loved."

On to Port au Prince, Haiti, where Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) conspires with Bolivian General Medrano in an arrangement where the military man will get the presidency of Bolivia in exchange for some worthless (so he thinks) desert; Greene, already having taken control of Haiti, is in cahoots with CIA agent Gregg Beam (David Harbour) and his assistant Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), who think Greene's geologists have discovered oil. Dominic uses the cover of his environmental organization Planet Greene in his quest to obtain a monopoly on the world's most precious resource.

Led to Greene, Bond, escaping an unsuccessful effort at assassination when Camille (a deeply tanned Olga Kurylenko) thinks he's someone else (whom Bond has already liquidated), thinking he's rescuing her, aborts Camille's effort - in a wild motorboat chevy - to eliminate General Medrano, who had murdered her father and family when she was a child. She's an embedded Bolivian secret agent bent on revenge.

Following his apologies, on to Austria for the Bregnez Floating Opera (a tragedy by Tosca) where Bond gets an earful from the conspirators, taking snapshots of those involved (very cool communications and data displays instead of gadgets), but in the process deadends a member of the British special branch. Ordered home by M - after what appears to be a rash of "killing every possible lead"- Bond ignores her command; believing she's lost her agent ("blinded by inconsolable rage"), possibly become a renegade to the other side, M removes his access to funds and further support.

In need of someone he can trust implicitly with connections, Bond goes to Talamone, Italy, for a visit with Rene Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini), who in the past was tortured and falsely sent to prison as a result of Bond's mistake; but Mathis, generously compensated by the British government, has a high regard for Bond's having admitted he was wrong. Together they hop across the Atlantic to La Paz, Bolivia, where delicious Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton) awaits Bond with a directive to pull him back to London with her.

Nothing doing, but he nuzzles and nibbles her naked back flesh along with rescuing Camille from Dominic's clutches at a Planet Greene fundraiser. After Mathis appears in the trunk of Bond's vehicle and Fields receives the black-goldfinger treatment, M makes the trip south: "I thought I could trust you. You said you weren't motivated by revenge."

There's nothing stopping Bond, though, committed to his duty, getting one of the CIA agents to do what's right, as he and Camille are engaged in a daring-do dogfight in the air, nearly meet their end in a fiery finale in Bolivia, yet the conclusion takes place dispassionately in a room in wintry-cold Kazan, Russia.

After disappointment with anyone other than Sean Connery in the role of James Bond, I'm once again a fan of the fantasy with Daniel Craig's buffed, brusque 007.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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