YMMV / Quantum of Solace

• Broken Base: The theme song by Jack White and Alicia Keys. Some fans don't mind it at all, while others think it's just trash. It doesn't help that some really, really good themes were rejected. Like this. Or this, by the legendary Shirley Bassey.
• Complete Monster: See here for both the film and game.
• Contested Sequel: The movie is highly divisive. Either this is an okay Bond movie that's not as good as Casino Royale (2006), or it's an egregious case of Sequelitis. Skyfall was put in Development Hell due to studio reshuffling and licensing issues, making Quantum even more divisive over time and leading to a giant What Could Have Been: had the third Craig-era Bond film come out faster, would it have retained continuity and cashed in the plot coupons Bond picked up in Quantum? About the only thing the base can agree on is that Casino Royale and Skyfall each sit on one end of the Bond spectrum of seriousness vs. crazy-but-awesome... and then there's Quantum: a terrible Bond movie but solid film, a terrible Bond movie and terrible film, or a solid film and solid Bond movie. For what it's worth, many reviewers couldn't make up their minds either.
• Continuity Lock-Out: For the first time in the franchise, after 46 years. You really shouldn't see this movie without seeing Casino Royale (2006) first.
• Critic-Proof: The film did very well at the box office (it is the fourth highest-grossing Bond film to date, without adjusting for inflation, earning $586 million worldwide), but it remains Daniel Craig's most divisive Bond film as far as critics are concerned.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mr. White. In this film and Casino Royale (2006), the character has more Moments of Awesome in his limited screen time than the two villains of both films combined. He was eventually brought back in Spectre.
  • Mathis qualifies with his role as aide and confidante to Craig's Bond in Casino Royale (2006). Here, he is willing to work with Bond again after being accused of The Mole in the last film.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: "No Good About Goodbye" by Shirley Bassey is widely considered to be a much superior song to the much-maligned "Another Way to Die."
• Faux Symbolism: Director Marc Forster made it a point for the film's action sequences to be based around the four Classical Elements, though the only one which has some bearing on the plot itself is the final battle centered around fire.
  • Air: The dogfight in the sky, only really used to get Bond and Camille to a place where they could figure out what Greene's goal actually is.
  • Water: The fight with boats, just... because it started on a dock.
  • Earth: The Chase Fight, like most fight scenes, take place on land.
  • Fire: The final battle in the hotel that's inexplicably Made of Explodium. It's used to give Bond's opponent a fighting chance, and to trigger Camille's psychological trauma. Though one has to wonder what happened to the hotel's staff or other occupants, including the waitress that we see is in the building shortly before the explosions start.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • According to Word of God, the reason Bond and Camille do not sleep together in this film is because the writers felt that having their hero seduce a traumatized rape victim would be in exceptionally poor taste. In the very next film, however, Bond does in fact seduce a traumatized rape victim...and it got the exact reaction they feared they would get with this one, so one wonders why they forgot.
  • The final battle has Bond finding a traumatized Camille in the burning hotel, leading to a moment where he hugs her tight and plans to shoot her before the fire gets to the both of them. No Time to Die has Bond finally go out by letting missiles incinerate him and the Heracles virus he's been infected with. But the circumstances are inverted: that virus variant could kill Madeleine and Mathilde, meaning that he could never touch his loved ones again. Thus, his last words only involve him speaking to Madeleine through a radio from far away.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Much was said about the untrained and not-at-all intimidating-looking Greene putting up a close fight against Bond in the climax. Although it's Truth in Television that wild attackers can be dangerous to even elite fighters (and Greene was aided by an early surprise attack and the explosions knocking both around), it still got flak. Greene is the only Craig-era Big Bad to actually fight him in hand-to-hand combat, let alone come close to killing him in combat, until No Time To Die had Safin attacking Bond and poisoning him — 007 still gets the upper hand and defeats him, but then prefers to die.
  • David Harbour plays Felix's CIA handler in this film. Twelve years later, he's playing an SVR agent / superhero.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common accusation is that the film simply repeats some things that worked so well in the last one — as well as the tricks of the Bourne films — except none of it feels new and fresh, let alone Bond-like. It also lacks humour; typical for a Bourne film but a staple of Bond.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Dominic Greene's scheme is withholding an entire country's water supply, dooming thousands of innocent people to die of thirst. But his personal MEH is when he had Agent Fields drowned in oil.
  • From Camille's backstory, one suspects that Medrano has made crossing this into a career. He's already a murderer, a torturer, an arsonist, and a rapist by backstory, so after he tries to rape the hostess, there's really no way his Karmic Death can be too harsh.
• Narm:
  • Dominic Greene when he goes Ax-Crazy. He is, ironically, the only Craig-era Bond villain to actually engage in physical combat with Bond at a film's climax, but he is clearly not suited to do so, eventually even axing his own foot in the process.
    "Please do not talk to me like I'm ZHUTPID!!!"
  • The fact that Quantum's scheme is foiled every step of the way, even despite having American support, makes them pretty laughable villains, especially since they're a stand-in for SPECTRE. Which might by why SPECTRE themselves basically destroyed Quantum by the time Spectre occurs.
  • Bond's pickup line when courting Fields. "I can't seem to find the... uh... stationary. Can you help me?" Probably the most pathetic attempt at a pickup line in the history of Bond (which still works, mind you). The pause between words seems to imply Craig (who actually worked on the script, and may very well have came up with that line) knew it was a bad line and delivered as such.
  • Elvis' bowl cut, which makes him look like Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber.
  • The Mood Whiplash following Mathis' death of Bond throwing his dead body into a dumpster and looting his wallet.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The film had a solid, if not particularly inspired, FPS (even if it's more of a Casino Royale adaptation - only five of its twenty levels are from Quantum of Solace). The PS2 version is a well made third person shooter, and the DS is hard to describe (with it being a top down stealth shooter using the DS sideways like Brain Age and controls being somewhat tricky to pull off at times). Incidentally, the Next-Gen and PC versions were done by Treyarch using the same engine as Call of Duty and were a solid FPS in that vein. The PC port was unfortunately locked to 30 frames per second (which is utterly pathetic by PC standards), but this can be fixed with a fan-made hack, although a few areas are still not as optimized to run perfectly at higher frames, depending on specs.
• One-Scene Wonder: The "Sweeping Guy◊", a background extra whose floor sweeping is several inches off the ground, has a bit of an ironic following among Bond fans.
• Porting Disaster: The Wii version of the game, based on the Next-Gen Versions, has issues:
  • Lighting and Prop physics are heavily downgraded, certain levels set at night are now set in early in the morning to try to hide this, avoiding search lights in one level is removed entirely as the search lights no longer exist.
  • The collectable phones are missing entirely, the MI6 briefing rooms are also removed entirely.
  • The in-game map is hard to use as it doesn't actually align properly anymore on most levels, meaning Bond will almost always be displayed off the map entirely.
  • Environment collision was simplified, meaning there are several sections where you can get shot through the environment.
  • While there are two new weapons (A Chrome Full-Auto Glock replacing the two Glocks in the original Xbox 360/PS3/PC version and a shotgun that's multiplayer-only.) several pre-existing weapons were downgraded, snipers and the LMG for instance lack a first person reload and are simply brought off-screen and back again without even a sound effect.
  • Enemies do increased damage and have more accuracy, which combined with the bad hit detection/environment collison, results in plenty of Fake Difficulty.
• Questionable Casting: The choice of Jack White and Alicia Keys for the film's theme song, "Another Way to Die". It's usually agreed that both musicians could've made a good title track by themselves, but the choice to put them together is part of the reason why the final track remains so controversial.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The new squeeze of Vesper's boyfriend who works for Canadian intelligence is played by Stana Katic, who would later become famous for playing NYPD detective Kate Beckett in Castle.
  • The poor molested lady in the hotel is played by Oona Chaplin, before she became famous for appearing on a lot of TV series (just one of them being Game of Thrones as Talisa Maegyr).
  • Yusef is played by Simon Kassianides, who later became famous for playing HYDRA operative Sunil Bakshi on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. So yes, he went from working for Quantum to working for HYDRA.
  • Felix's handler Gregg Beam is played by David Harbour, who would go on to become Jim Hopper in Stranger Things, Hellboy in the 2019 reboot, and Red Guardian in Black Widow.
  • Guy Haines is played by Paul Ritter, who would later become more famous for playing Martin Goodman in Friday Night Dinner and Anatoly Dyatlov in Chernobyl.
• The Scrappy:
  • Dominic Greene is popularly cited as the weakest of the Craig-era villains, and one of the most underwhelming baddies in the franchise's history. He doesn't have any of the visceral psychosis or sadism of Le Chiffre, Silva or Oberhauser, and he overall comes off more as a shyster trying to make a quick buck than as a Worthy Opponent for MI6's top agent. It's perhaps telling that, although Spectre acknowledges him as an agent of the titular organization and his photo is seen briefly, he isn't included in the literal Rogues Gallery towards the end.
  • His henchman Elvis isn't much better in this regard, sharing similar issues with Greene and often being regarded as The Load. There's also the fact that, while most Bond villains and henchmen are known for having a particularly quirky physical distinction, his apparently being having a dodgy toupee makes him hard to take seriously.
  • General Medrano comes across as a one-dimensional monster more typical of a Rambo sequel than Bond.
• Sequelitis: As a direct follow-up to Casino Royale, it was hit by this hard as fans considered it to be an underwhelming continuation of Bond's revenge-driven pursuit of Quantum, with both the villains and their ultimate scheme to be badly overshadowed by those of the previous film. Especially unfortunate as it is one of the few films in the franchise to serve as a direct sequel to a preceding movie, which prior to the reboot initiated by Casino Royale had maintained at best only a loose continuity. To date, it is generally considered the weakest of Craig's Bond movies. A common complaint is that while Casino Royale put the action style of The Bourne Series, Quantum downright tries to be a Bourne movie with Bond (with the excessive Jitter Cam only helping the notion).
• Squick:
  • When Greene splits his own foot with the axe.
  • What we're told about his death may also count.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: More so than its predecessor, the film was criticised by some for trying so hard to ape the Bourne films, right down to the jitter cam action sequences, that it barely felt like a James Bond film.
• The Woobie:
  • Camille Montes's family was murdered by General Medrano, who also raped her mother and older sister when she was still a little girl. The experience, which left a scar on her upper back, also left her with crippling pyrophobia.
  • Agent Fields is a simple clerk working for MI6 who gets swayed by Bond's charms and dragged into his Roaring Rampage of Revenge, and ends up paying for it with her life. Even the stoic Bond was left guilt-ridden and furious at her death.

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