Daniel Craig (right) and Olga Kurylenko, the lead actors of the 22nd James Bond film 'Quantum of Solace'. Photo: AP

GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE

By Peter Bradshaw in London

Daniel Craig can pull off a chase scene in fine style, but the new Bond film is still a disappointment.

Quantum of Solace — Director: Marc Forster; Cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench (106 mins)

Daniel Craig's difficult second album in the role of 007 has turned out to be a concept album. And that concept is rage. When we left the agent at the end of Casino Royale, the great man was hurting. His love, Vesper Lynd, had betrayed him, apparently, and his heart was broken. The icy cynicism, the flippant mannerisms and the womanising: it is all to anaesthetise that primal agony. Now he's out for revenge and Bond has gone over the edge -and over the top.

His ostensible mission is to crack a secret society of apolitical baddies, called Quantum; their key player, Dominic Greene, is played by French character actor Mathieu Amalric, a man with humorously crazy eyes and teeth of quasi-British dodginess. Greene is a super-rich businessman out to buy vast swathes of real estate, so he can control the water supplyof an entire continent. Bond must take him down.

But it's all a cover. What Bond really wants is revenge on this man who stole his love. M, played by Dame Judi Dench, is furious with Bond as he starts topping and whacking people right, left and centre, without maintaining proper discipline. MI6 decides it must cut Bond loose, because he's gone rogue - like Sarah Palin, only with less expensive clothes. Thevery first sequence shows Bond driving recklessly around a classic Italian hillside, firing guns and crashing, and Craig appears to be doing a fair bit of stunt driving himself, with some unattractive grimacing thrown in.

I have to confess that this second Bond adventure disappointed me a little: it's not nearly as smart as Craig's debut. There is not much storyline or romance - although there is some hotel-suite action with a sexy British agent called Fields, played by Gemma Arterton, who greets Bond at the airport apparently wearing nothing but a raincoat, like some sort ofMI6 stripogram. (And incidentally, the objection I levelled at Casino Royale remains in force. Why on earth is the classic Bond theme tune saved until the end?)

What Quantum of Solace does have is Daniel Craig. No one could deny Craig's charisma, and the effortless way he has inhabited the role. He has some spectacular action sequences and a fair few close-quarter punch-ups in the manner of Bourne, along with some athletic rooftop-leaping chase scenes that Bonds of an earlier vintage would have rejected as being too much like hard work.

Yet I can't quite accept the criticism that Bond here is just a glorified hit-man who never does any real intelligence work. There is an ingenious scene in which Bond is one of thousands of tuxedoed types at the opera, eavesdropping on the secret long-distance pow-wow the villains are having through special earpieces: 007 finds a droll way of getting them toreveal themselves so he can take covert photographs on his mobile phone.

Quantum of Solace isn't bad, but from now on, Craig's Bond has to be a real character with something real at stake, however absurd. Otherwise we're going to return to the franchise production line. That would be an awful shame.