James Bond's 22nd outing, "The Quantum of Solace" is kind of a mixed bag. There were parts that I really liked and parts that I was kind of ho-hum about. In some ways, I'd almost rather a James Bond movie be bad instead of it being kinda dull. The bad Bond movies always deliver either corniness or cool gadgets.

To me, "Casino Royale" wasn't quite as ground breaking as a lot of critics have written it out to be and is instead a very loose reimagining of the Bond franchise. What they did was to take these really old Bond archetypes and turn them on their head. The Bond girl was someone that you actually cared about. You got a little bit of Bond's back story. The Bond villain was actually interesting and not very cartoonish. The gadgets were gone.

But beyond the expansion of the Bond Universe, it was still very much a James Bond movie. He still schmoozes the ladies. He still performs impossible stunts. He still drives the Aston Martin. Still flings the sardonic one-liners.

I almost wish that the Bond franchise had gone completely Jason Bourne on us and gave us an authentically real look at what it'd be like to be James Bond. But if "Casino Royale" is as close to a realistic James Bond as we're going to get, I wish that "Quantum of Solace" had picked up thematically where "Casino Royale" left off. It picks up the narrative almost instantly and we get to see what happens minutes after Casino Royale's goose-bump inducing final scene, but I wish that "Quantum of Solace" had done a better job at following the path of turning Bond and the people around him into real flesh and blood characters.

Where the movie fails is that although they give you information about some of the secondary characters, I didn't find their stories all that interesting. Olga Karilenko did a good job as the requisite Bond girl/woman Camille, and I like that James Bond chooses not to pursue her, but I didn't find her story all that believable or interesting. If you're going to do a revenge plot, you gotta make it more engaging than giving us a 30-second speech about why they're seeking revenge.

Mathieu Amalric's Dominic Green was a pretty sinister villain, but I found his plan to be a little too old-school James Bondesque. Plotting to control the world's water supply is timely, sure, but that someone could realistically pull this off is hard to swallow. They even gave him a hidden fortress.

Daniel Craig did a great job again. I still think its too early to tell, but he could be on his way to becoming the best of the Bonds. I just hope they keep him a little more real and dark and resist the urge to take him into Pierce Brosnan and Roger Moore territory with the one-liners and action devoid of danger for the principal characters.

I also don't completely get why they threw in the gun-barrel scene at the end. It felt really out of place. As I've said in a previous post, they need to have it on the beginning of the movie or not at all.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie a lot and can't wait to see it again. But it is a tad bit disappointing as I was hoping for so much more.

- Matt