Greene Piece

The Lost Potential of Dominic Greene

Quantum of Solace. What can you say, really? The cinematic equivalent of an episode of Changing Rooms. They had a small window of time and resources in which to knock up an attractive, yet familiar, room, but by the time it was released into the world, the floating shelf of Bond, was all over the floor, surrounded by broken antique tea-pots.

Daniel Craig has said in many interviews that they had to make it there and then due to the writers strike (and threatened actor strike), or it would take another year to release. The simple answer, when negotiating the broken crockery of the final product, was surely to leave it a year, and use that time to build something everyone was happy with, but we know that schedules, especially with Bond, don't work like that. Once the touch paper is lit, it's a race to get it all done before it explodes in your face, which in this case, it truly did. 

However there was one piece of detritus that can be furtively plucked from the wreckage, and that's the performance of Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene. While it can be argued that he wasn't given a fair shake of it, what with his bad guy not really given much to do, it can also be argued that when he is on screen, you buy that he has power, you buy that he has influence, and you buy that he can have you killed, or dipped in oil (without leaving any spillage in your hotel room). It seems odd to me that you would cast such a formidably brooding character actor (who classes his way through Munich, and is incredible as the tragic Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), who is able to emit such gravity from behind those sullen, sunken eyes, and give him little to nothing to do. He should have had a henchman, someone with the appropriate muscle to go with his mind - an Odd-Job like figure for him to hide behind. As it is they handed him a lanky bloke in a wig called "Elvis".

 Sadly he is locked in a film that no one really likes or remembers, and even when stuck inside that, in much the same way he was as Jean-Dominique Bauby, no one remembers how good he was - and how good he could have been if he'd been given some heft to play with. As it is, he's sat on the throne of "Quantum", a mysterious S.P.E.C.T.R.E-lite, that controls the entire world, and yet no one knows who they are. An interesting concept that could have gathered some pace with a punchy monologue, but all he is given is his exchange with General Medrano, where he threatens to put his testicles in a jar. It's fine, but it needs more - and if he was given the kind of silky monologue that Silva was handed in Skyfall, he wouldn't be so utterly unmemorable and forgotten. In the recent documentary about Daniel Craig that was released on Apple+, Amalric is not even given a passing mention, and that struck me as a bit strange, until you remember that I think EON, and especially Craig, would like to to just sort of forget the film exists. 

Greene doesn't even die on screen, he's left aimlessly wandering the desert, and we're told later he drank a can of oil and died. I struggle to think of a Bond villain handled so badly, and given such an uneventful send off, but that sort of sums up the film in general. 

So here's to you Mathieu Amalric, sorry it didn't work out, but it really should have.