Action, reaction

In 'Quantum of Solace,' it's explosions, chases, and business as usual for Daniel Craig's James Bond

"Quantum of Solace" is just a fancy way of saying, "Insert hectic action sequence here." Minutes in, James Bond is chasing baddies through an Italian tunnel while aboveground a horse race is frantically underway. Not much later, he's swinging up into a glass dome, back into some scaffolding, and — oh, James, do look out for that beam.

The camera swoops and jerks like a rubber bat on a string, and all the shots look as if they've been thrown into an industrial-strength blender. Some people will see all this and think, "Wow." But no 007 experience should come so close to being a slushie.

The same could not be said of "Casino Royale," the previous installment, which rebooted the film series and introduced us to Bond as played by Daniel Craig, the unsmiling slab of man who'd taken over the job of world-saving and sport sex from Pierce Brosnan. The history of movies is full of men with the faces of unmade beds. Craig's might be the first to look rumpled by something other than sleeping.

If the foot chases and preordained explosions seemed meaningless, the solemnity behind the whole enterprise redeemed it. Craig and the filmmakers had given us the shock of seeing James Bond in a psychological, moral, and romantic tragedy. No matter how good he looked in a bathing suit, this Bond didn't seem overly pleased with himself.

In "Casino Royale," the excitement of Craig's performance lay in his being the only actor to play this part not interested in posing. Sadly, round two is business as usual. Craig dutifully time-shares the action sequences with stunt doubles and charitably allows Tom Ford's clothes, including one fetching tuxedo, to wear him.

One movie ago, Bond lost ladylove Vesper Lynd, Eva Green's bodacious treasury agent, and "Quantum of Solace" stingily leaves him no time to mourn her death. Part of his mission involves avenging Vesper, but mostly he winds up trying to stop a fake environmentalist comically named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric). Greene is a member of a terrorist outfit who plans to orchestrate an overthrow of the Bolivian government in order to hog the water supply. This is a loony little nugget of plot since its hollow echoes of "Chinatown" are reinforced by the amusement of savoring just how much Amalric resembles that movie's director, Roman Polanski.

Bond's sidekick is Greene's ex, Camille Montes, a Bolivian agent played, in a coup of colorblind casting, by the Ukrainian supermodel Olga Kurylenko. (The color, by the way, is tan.) Camille is eager to kill the former dictator (Joaquin Cosio) who oversaw the death of her family, and Bond is less eager than you'd expect to get to know her better. For that, there's an MI6 operative named Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton). He and Camille share nothing more intimate (and ridiculous) than a parachute crash in the Bolivian desert. Their trudge through the sand - he in a tux and she in a little black dress - produces the movie's prettiest image. That it also happens to look like a cologne ad doesn't seem at all beside the point.

The rest of the story has Jeffrey Wright reprising his part as Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter. Wright mostly sits around saying nothing while David Harbour, as another, crasser agent, amusingly runs his mouth. And the screenwriters - Paul Haggis and the steady adaptors of Ian Fleming's 007 stories, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade - have placed Bond in hot water with his boss, M (Judi Dench), whose larger role now revolves mostly around her poor judgment.

One agent is a turncoat, and Bond, in her estimation, is running wild. So she tries reining him in to curb his body count, which amounts to his being cut from the agency. Frankly, "Quantum of Solace" is just one exasperated dressing down away from being "Lethal Weapon 9."

Poor M: All these years and she's still holding out hope that Her Majesty's superspy will change his slutty, homicidal ways. I'm just as bad. I keep looking to these movies for a semblance of geopolitical logic. (Would Bolivian president Evo Morales stand for a Frenchman's coup? Who cares?) Attending a James Bond movie for fresh ideas on world affairs is like going to a strip club for the beer.

The trouble with "Quantum of Solace" is that the frills are a mess, too. Even the customary opening title sequence, with its writhing silhouettes and screechy theme song by Jack White and Alicia Keys, is a cheesy throwback to the Roger Moore era: Ladies and gentlemen, the Quantum of Solace dancers!

Director Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball," "Finding Neverland") is a man with a decent eye, but his sense of filmmaking verges on the grandiose. Cutting, for instance, between a shootout and the climax of Puccini's "Tosca" is beyond the pale. And what are we to make of an unfollowable sequence set at a desert hotel powered by hydrogen fuel cells beyond its being a terrible entrepreneurial endeavor? (It takes about two minutes to blow the whole thing up.)

All this carelessly wasted stunt work makes you long for the craftsmanship that goes into making the "Bourne" movies such effective precision entertainments.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.