Quantum of Solace

I suppose it got started when a cowboy in a silent-movie saloon fight broke a balsa wood chair over another cowboy’s head, and the stricken wrangler didn’t fall down dead with a cerebral hematoma, but got up to fight some more. It wasn’t helped when Tom Mix or Gene Autry shot a pistol out of a bad man’s hand, and the baddie just said OUCH! and shook his hand like it stung a little, instead of getting on his knees and picking up his severed fingers. No need to get into the inability of men with machine guns pouring out a virtual cloud of lead to hit anything they’re aiming at with lethal, much less injurious, result. Over the years the movies have become more and more divorced from the principles of gravity, inertia, and momentum so brilliantly expounded by Sir Isaac Newton. Now we have heroes falling off seven-story buildings, landing on their feet, and not even breaking a toe. No explanation necessary, you don’t even have to land on a convenient awning or car roof any more. Two other principles that have been dispensed with entirely are the chemical properties of combustion (a big fire—and there are no small ones in the movies—usually produces choking, lethal smoke, and it always uses up all the oxygen in a room, in addition to being hot enough to burn the skin off your body and set your clothes on fire if you stay close to it for more than a second or two) and any notion of the velocity of an explosion powerful enough to destroy a building. You don’t outrun an explosion like that, believe me. Yet we see it in every action movie now, sometimes three or four times. I could go on, but you know the drill. These days, if a movie has only a few implausible scenes, like the Bourne movies, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief. But most movies are like this one, with a flatly impossible series of capers every ten minutes or so. I yawn. Daniel Craig is a terrific James Bond and I liked Casino Royale well enough, but this one was way over the edge. Not to mention the ultra-fast editing, such that you frequently don’t know who’s doing what to whom … and even worse, don’t care.