2 1/2 out of 4 stars

Enter the Daniel Craig era. Ian Felming's iconic Bond is no longer tall, dark and handsome. Now he's tallish, blond and really, really angry. I thought "Casino Royale" was a lot of fun, though it had too many false endings. Definitely got things back on track.
"Quantum of Solace" keeps the train-a-rollin'.

Yeah. The dude from the end is Bond's prisoner at the beginning of QOS, and we find out that he is part of a secret-secret-secret group that all the secret-secret groups don't even know about, though they "have people everywhere". They're also responsible for that other Bond Girl's death...somehow. Plus they're trying to get a lot of oil and they have ties to the ex-dictator of Bolivia.
OK, so "Quantum of Solace" boils down to this: Blond James Bond is really mad at the secret-secret-secret group who killed his sort-of girlfriend and wants to control the world's oil supply with the Bolivian guy, so he spends about two hours killing everyone he comes across who is connected to them.

Not to say I didn't enjoy the movie. No, I just didn't have any clue what was going on most of the time. This was probably due to the combination of the "action sequence every 2.6 minutes" script policy or the dude sitting behind me who kept crawling over the empty seat two places down from me to go check his stupid cell phone every ten minutes. When you watch two hours of wanton physical violence, you get bad ideas about how to deal with clueless moviegoers.
QOS is a fun movie, and this year, outside of a couple of striking exceptions, that's been hard to find. But I'm still not entirely sold on the "ultra-cold merciless killer" Bond. The Batman treatment may have saved the Bond Franchise from total irrelevance, but I hope they don't push it too far.

---
(Editor's note: Now that you've read the review I want to tell you that my first idea for the review title was "Blond on Bond", but I thought it might dissuade people from reading it. But I wanted you to know that I thought of it. I thought it was pretty good.)