Top gun

Let me give you the bad news first: Daniel Craig only removes his shirt once — I repeat, once — during the entire 106 minutes of Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond thriller. The good news is that, even without the torso-baring, the lean and rugged actor has never been sexier. It’s amazing what a thirst for revenge — and some Steve McQueen-style white pants — can do for a man.

What was great about Casino Royale, and now Quantum of Solace, is the retro focus on two things that the Bond series discarded sometime in the early ’70s: drama and character development.

More importantly (at least to some viewers), Quantum is a worthy sequel to Casino Royale (2006), the first of the Craig Bonds. While that film gave the elderly 007 franchise a terrific reboot, this one keeps up the feverish momentum. It isn’t a better movie — Casino had a nastier villain and a more inspired climax — but it builds compellingly on the new blueprint.

Quantum picks up less than an hour after Casino broke off. When we left him, Craig’s MI6 agent had just lost his one true love, fellow spy Vesper Lynd, who was coerced into betraying him and then left to die. Now, he’s hell-bent on tracking down her blackmailers. It’s a quest that leads him smack into the machinations of yet another power-mad Bond bad guy. This one is a business magnate named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who poses as an impassioned eco-crusader while secretly plotting to monopolize natural resources. Imagine Al Gore’s evil French twin.

The Bond films are nothing if not superficially topical — even while remaining rooted in author Ian Fleming’s 1950s world of martinis, tuxedos and hit-and-run sex. (Fleming’s Bond was Mad Men’s Don Draper with a licence to kill.) What was great about Casino Royale, and this movie, too, is the retro focus on two other things that the Bond series discarded sometime in the early ’70s: drama and character development.

Not only is Craig delicious eye candy, but he gives a performance we can almost discuss with a straight face. His young Bond is a highly skilled but wildly undisciplined assassin who hasn’t yet learned to separate his personal feelings from his professional duties. He’s a man riddled with flaws, which gives his boss, M (Judi Dench) — the lone holdover from the Pierce Brosnan era — something to do besides dispense brittle quips. She’s become his mentor/parent, struggling both to guide her unruly new agent and to rein him in.

She has a job of work to do this time. The bloody-minded Bond is less interested in gathering intelligence than in leaving a trail of corpses in his wake. His relentless pursuit takes him from Siena, Italy, to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he stumbles upon Dominic Greene. Under the cover of his environmentally friendly company, Greene Planet, the tycoon is busy facilitating a coup in Bolivia. In return for helping an odious right-wing general (Joaquin Cosio) overthrow the socialist government, Greene wants exclusive rights to Bolivia’s water. (The movie plays on the idea that Greene’s less astute business partners figure he’s after Bolivian oil — but today’s visionary super-villain knows that controlling the oil supply is passé.)

From there, the plot ricochets between Europe and South America. In Austria, Bond uncovers Quantum, a global conspiracy involving Greene and other influential business and government figures. In Bolivia, he goes after Greene, leading to a showdown at a remote desert hotel. In between, he finds a soulmate in Camille (the fiery Olga Kurylenko), a headstrong Bolivian spy also seeking revenge, and a bedmate in Fields (the prim Gemma Arterton), a naive young British agent. (Her full name, only indicated in the credits, is Strawberry Fields. Some silly Bond traditions never die.)

Casino Royale’s Italian operative Mathis, played by the wonderfully world-weary Giancarlo Giannini, makes a welcome (if brief) return. So does Jeffrey Wright’s low-key CIA agent, Felix Leiter, who looks supremely bummed out as he watches his cynical superior tacitly approve the Bolivian coup. But it’s Dench who really expands on her performance from the previous film. For someone with a desk job, her M certainly gets around — she pops up in just about every exotic locale that Bond goes to (often ahead of him). That allows for more face-to-face exchanges between the two, where she chastises him like an angry mother who is secretly proud of her rebellious offspring. Their prickly scenes together are more intimate and entertaining than those between Craig and the obligatory Bond girls.

Amalric, in contrast, is a big disappointment. The French star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Kings and Queen is a lovable actor with sweetly innocent eyes — an unlikely but promising choice for a Bond villain. He might’ve had fun playing up — and then slowly peeling away — Greene’s good-guy environmentalist façade. Instead, the character is revealed as a cold bastard right from the start, and not a very interesting one at that. I thought director Marc Forster, whose past credits include sensitive dramas like The Kite Runner and Finding Neverland, would have spent some screen time making Greene a more complex adversary.

But Forster seems to have been cowed by the task of directing his first action blockbuster. At times, it feels like he’s let the stunt doubles and FX experts steer the ship. The movie could have lost at least one in its glut of adrenalin sequences — preferably the bit where Bond and Camille freefall from a cargo plane, which comes painfully close to some of the hokier superhuman feats of Brosnan’s 007.

The best action scenes are the ones where Forster makes his mark by showing a playful touch. In the Haiti segment, he capitalizes on the blond, blue-eyed Craig’s physical resemblance to McQueen by putting him in those iconic white pants and having him steal a motorcycle à la The Great Escape. Later, in Austria, there’s a witty scene with Bond battling baddies backstage during an opera performance. The show onstage is the Bregenz Festival’s spectacular avant-garde staging of Puccini’s Tosca — an opera that, ironically, happens to be about a woman who fatally betrays her lover.

On the whole, though, Forster retains the new, sombre tone that characterized Casino Royale — not to mention the whiplash speed and bone-crunching violence that has brought the series into line with other, less ancient action franchises. The chases and fights are hyper-edited in the style of the Bourne thrillers. Bond accumulates an overlay of cuts and bruises to rival those of Die Hard’s John McClane. In just two movies, Craig’s 007 has already shed more blood than his five predecessors combined. (Toward the end of his run, Roger Moore’s amiable agent didn’t even break a sweat.) This late-model Bond may still have a superhero’s resilience, but at least his chassis now shows credible signs of wear and tear.

I won’t reveal whether the grieving Bond achieves a quantum of solace by the end of the movie. But I can say that Bond fans will be left with a quantum of reassurance: the world’s oldest active secret agent still has a lot of life left in him.

Quantum of Solace opens Nov. 14.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.