I come from a family where everyone is a James Bond fan. Dad was training on board the HMS Fearless when The Spy Who Loved Me (starring Roger Moore as Bond) was being filmed on it. He declined the part of an extra. Mum has pretty much seen every single James Bond movie. My brother and I are in agreement that Sean Connery is the best Bond, followed closely by Daniel Craig.

Having said that, I caught Quantum of Solace at GSC’s Signature at the Gardens earlier tonight. I came into the movie with comments from friend who watched it earlier; most of them being in the negative. Most of them mentioned that it wasn’t a Bond movie at all.

Thankfully, their comments are quite unfounded. Bedding a fellow agent, the cool but un-introduced (Q is still missing) gadgets, the sequence involving an old DC-10 and a fighter plane, the subsequent parachute jump into a large sinkhole, and the final fight in a boutique hotel in the middle of a BOLIVIAN desert…the movie has everything one could ask for in a typical Bond movie.

It’s just that director Marc Foster chose to film all that, and increase the level of violence and physicality (which even former body-builder Bond, Sean Connery, would find hard press to match in his heyday) and throw in a large body count for Bond…and then play back everything at 1.5 X speed for the audience. It’s no wonder some people found the movie disorientating.

And the comparisons with Jason Bourne? The Bourne movies are about a cold blooded killer who slowly regains his humanity. Bond on the other hand, is on his way to becoming a ruthless assassin.

Watching the villain Dominic Greene, I felt like he is not unlike the economic hitmen described by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and is probably a hundred times worse. The new Bond girl, played by Olga Kurylenko, is one of two Bond girls throughout history to look beautiful and kick ass at the same time; Michelle Yeoh (Tomorrow Never Dies) is the other.

Yup, the movie is all good. Be sure to catch it in a cinema near you. Now I can’t wait for the third part of this rebooted Bond franchise. Bring it on…shaken, not stirred!