Quantum of Solace

Essential as the second half of a story, and it has to be watched directly after Casino Royale. It begins in a car chase that starts minutes after that film ends, with the same prisoner in the boot, and it assumes you remember every name. Watched alone it is incoherent.

It is the shortest Bond film at a hundred and six minutes and the most compromised in production. A writers' strike began shortly before shooting with no finished script, and Craig and the director worked on scenes themselves during filming, which is a situation nobody should be in on a film of this size.

What that produced is a revenge story stripped to the bone. Bond spends the film going through people, barely speaking, ignoring instructions and leaving bodies that M cannot explain, and the entire question is whether he is working or grieving. Judi Dench's scenes with him are the best in the film, and the ending, in which he finally does the one thing the previous film left open, is a genuinely good resolution.

The editing is the standing complaint and it is correct: several action sequences are cut so fast and so close that the geography is lost, particularly the opening and the boat chase. The Tosca sequence at the opera is the exception and is superb. Treat it as the last forty minutes of Casino Royale.