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There's something unlikely about this new James Bond. First of all, this guy, Daniel Craig, rather resembles Monty Python castmember Michael Palin with better abs, and you just don't expect Palin to take on a grim expression, scamper across rooftops in foreign lands, and ruthlessly kill counterspies and international schemers. For another thing, every few years the Bond franchise has tried to update the character, and they haven't had much luck. They let Timothy Dalton brood as the character and wound up with an actor who merely looked pained when the scripts asked him to pronounce Bond's trademark postmortem quips. Dalton lasted two films. The series never really knew what to do with Pierce Brosnan, who should have been an excellent Bond, but when you put him behind the wheels of an invisible car even an actor as classy as Brosnan is going to look a little silly; he has done far better work post Bond in films, particularly as a contract killer suffering a nervous breakdown in The Matador.

But, with Daniel Craig, the series found its footing again, mostly by jettisoning a lot of the baggage of previous Bond films. Gone were the quips: This Bond kills with ruthless efficiency, pausing only long enough to watch his victim die with a sort of cold curiosity. Bond's gizmos are mostly gone. He still makes extensive use of bleeding edge technology, but Craig employees gadgets that seem like they might actually exist -- his is a Bond with a particular taste for cell phones and digital cameras. Craig's Bond doesn't even drink vodka martinis, preferring, instead, the more complicated Vesper from Casino Royale, which, in Quantum of Solace, the newest film, he neither names nor remembers the recipe for.

By chucking these conventions, Casino Royale both distinguished Daniel Craig as a new kind of Bond and made the character newly credible. No longer was he an old man in a tuxedo with a surprising capacity for knowing how to do things, like Roger Moore. He was a brutal killer with a non-nonsense approach to intelligence -- the film made it clear that Bond could easily figure out whatever he needed to know, but tended to prefer uncluttered methods that often involved torturing or killing people. In some ways, this new Bond had a lot in common with classic American detectives, in that his chief method of investigation seemed to be to create as much chaos as possible and watch where everything landed when the explosions stopped, and his biggest asset was his ability to take, and inflict, extraordinary amounts of punishment.

So that brings us to Quantum of Solace, the most nonsensically named Bond film and the first that is a direct sequel. The film opens with a crackerjack car chase through the narrow cliffside streets of Lake Garda, Italy. Critics have complained that director Marc Forster has edited this scene a little too loosely -- it's full of sudden cuts and huge shifts in perspective. I expect whether this confuses or excites you will be a matter of taste, but I found it effective. The cutting is startling enough to makes the events a bit stupifying, but I didn't get the sense that the director had made this decision to compensate for not being able to film action. In fact, some of the images in this scene, including a car plummeting off the side of a cliff, are breathtaking. Instead, the editing seemed designed to reflect the real confusion that arises when many things are happening all at once. Quantum of Solace exists in a world where there is no clear right or wrong, decisions are made on the fly with very little real information, and sometimes, as a result, the wrong decisions are made. Craig's Bond is not a man who stops to ponder all this, but instead just bullies his way along, which leads, in one instance, to him accidentally killing an ally, and, in another, allowing himself to fall into a trap that kills another old friend. Marc Foster has made an interesting decision, in that, especially during the action scenes, he does not allow audiences a clear vantage point, but instead thrusts them into the action and uses editing to heighten their, and Bonds's, bewilderment.

The plot has Bond tracking down the people responsible for the death of Vesper Lynn, the object of his affection in the last film. This leads him to uncover a vast multinational conspiracy, seemingly spearheaded by an especially oily businessman (Mathieu Amalric) who is using an environmental nonprofit group as a front for profiting off coups in third-world countries. The details of this are less interesting than the moral quagmire it produces: Quantum of Solace has the CIA actively scheming with this group and British intelligence refusing to investigate them (both making the argument that to effectively represent their interests in the world, they must make deals with some very shady people). As in the last film, Bond essentially goes rogue in chasing down the bad guys, and, as in the last film, it is not out of some clearly defined moral sense, but because he doesn't like them. The main scheme afoot here is to destabilize Bolivia and put a military commander in charge, but the film very clearly gives the sense that this has happened many times before, and that the country has been run by puppet dictators so long that yet another change in management will scarcely attract notice.

Quantum of Solace resurrects one elements of the old Bond films -- the chief villains here belong to a vast, octopus-like criminal organization with its tentacles grasping for power all over the globe. Called Quantum in this film, the organization may as well be SMERSH or SPECTRE, and the organization likewise seems to spend most of its time making underhanded deals while drinking champagne in quasi-futuristic settings. But if the villains are the same, the heroes have changed. Intelligence agencies no longer represent a thin, invisible line between good and evil. They are, instead, often in cahoots with the schemers, hoping to use them to forward schemes of their own, and the only thing stopping them is one bewildered and often careless killer. In this way, Quantum of Solace manages to repeat the success of Casino Royale: Since we currently find ourselves in a world where our governments are often too happy to throw ethics and law aside in favor of expedience, Quantum of Solace seems depressing credible.