Hollywood Product - Quantum of Solace

GENRE: Bond movie. James Bond movie.

THE PITCH: Picking up where Casino Royale left off, the British superspy (Daniel Craig) tracks his girlfriend's killers to a mysterious organization whose members include a power broker (Mathieu Amalric) with sinister plans for the Bolivian desert. Bond's bid for payback finds a parallel in a leggy, vengeful mystery woman (Olga Kurylenko).

MONEY SHOTS: The opening car chase on an insanely crowded highway. A Bourne Ultimatum-type chase from rooftop to rooftop in Italy. A Bourne-type hand-to-hand fight scene. Bond smacks a moped accelerator and steals it from its driver. A desert hotel powered by fuel cells erupts with fireballs all over the place at the end. (Given the choice, I'd stay the night somewhere else.)

BEST LINE: "When someone says 'We've got people everywhere,' you assume it's hyperbole. Florists says that," declares spymaster M. (Judi Dench) after an aide betrays her. Bond also has an appropriately terse remark, "Don't bleed to death."

BODY COUNT: About two dozen, assuming none of the goons drowned or exploded in the boat chase. The most memorable violence occurs when a villain catches a fire axe in the foot. Bond unceremoniously leaves one body in a dumpster.

FLESH FACTOR: Craig shows off his famed musculature in some shirtless scenes, and steals a tuxedo from one guy who's even more ripped. A hottie shows a lot of bare back in one bedroom scene, and there's a did-I-just-see-that? up-the-skirt shot late in the film. Overall, 007 doesn't get it on that much by Bond film standards.

FASHION STATEMENTS: Fields (Gemma Arterton), a young intelligence operative, meets Bond wearing a trench coat and nothing visible underneath. (Is it supposed to be a dress, or what?) Bond spends seemingly half the film in a bloody tuxedo shirt.

SOUNDTRACK HIGHLIGHTS: Jack White and Alicia Keys sing the first-ever duet in a Bond title sequence, "Another Way to Die," over visuals of writhing women made out of sand. It's kind of fun as these things go.

PRODUCT PLACEMENT: It's practically a commercial for the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot cell phone, which can apparently do so much, Bond doesn't need gadgets from Q any more. (M.'s wall-size computer interface looks like something out of Minority Report, though.)

BOND LORE REFERENCES: Bond drives an Aston-Martin and develops his taste for shaken vodka martinis. A woman's corpse is covered in oil like the gold-painted body in Goldfinger. The "gun sight" logo turns up at the end, and the closing credits promise "James Bond Will Return."

BETTER THAN CASINO ROYALE? No. The previous film enriched the tired franchise by focusing more deeply on character, and audiences should re-watch it to refresh their memories. Quantum, as the BBC's Lizo Mzimba observed, "feels like the second film of a trilogy," relying heavily on Casino Royale's set-up while leaving some plot-threads naggingly unresolved.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Quantum of Solace plays for lower stakes than Casino, with its relatively modest villain plot and too much fussy, showy cross-cutting in the action scenes from director Marc Forster. It still offers a fast pace, exotic locations and a likeable interplay between Craig and Dench, and hopefully Bond's next outing will be bigger than Quantum.