Bravura Bond, silly title and all

Lean, mean and out for blood, Daniel Craig makes his second appearance as James Bond in Quantum of Solace. It's a title that hardly makes sense - if I've got my Webster's Dictionary right, it translates to measurable amount of the alleviation of grief. But who knows, maybe it'll become a generational catchphrase. Or at least it's something you'd say to a Starbucks barrista: I'll have a venti latte with a quantum of solace, thanks.

A sequel to Casino Royale (the action starts almost immediately where the last one ended), Quantum begins with the steely 007 tooling his Aston Martin around hairpin turns on the Italian coast. Her Majesty's Secret Service agent is being pursued by a convoy of Alfa Romeos and SUVs - with automatic weapons poking from the windows. There are 360-degree spins and a bash-up in a rock quarry, and then Bond, bloodied but not bowed, rolls into Siena.

"It's time to get out," he informs the prisoner tied up in the trunk, now briskly escorted to a subterranean lair where M (Judi Dench) and a fellow MI6-er are ready to extract information. Dame Judi, waterboarding? Say it ain't so.

Directed by Marc Forster, the German-born helmer of Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland and The Kite Runner, the hyperactive Quantum finds Bond in gloomy humor. The British Treasury agent he tumbled for in Casino Royale - Eva Green's Vesper Lynd - is dead, and 007 wants those responsible to pay for her murder, with their lives.

And so, as Bond jumps and jogs across Siena rooftops (a chase that cuts back and forth to the Palio horse race in the city's main piazza), or goes speedboating after baddies in Port au Prince, Haiti, the bodies start piling up.

"If you could avoid killing every possible lead, it would be deeply appreciated," cracks M, trying to get a handle on this covert gang of global goons known as Quantum.

Enter Olga Kurylenko, the Ukrainian supermodel, playing a geologist named Camille, who's all tied up with French philanthropist Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric). At least he pretends to be philanthropic, developing a group of "eco-parks" to promote alternative energy, but there's something about the way he sneers - and something in the way he passes Camille off to a sadistic Bolivian general - that leads one to suspect Monsieur Greene may be, well, Quantum's number-one villain. And number-one ham, too.