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It’s not easy being Bond. Not these days at least. Once upon a time the British secret agent could extricate himself from most scrapes with a wry quip and a customised cigarette lighter/teargas dispenser, but the job description has got a whole lot more demanding since Daniel Craig stepped into the tuxedo. Bond bleeds. He’s bruised, burnt and looks decidedly crumpled by the end of the movie. He grimaces in irritation as shrapnel fragments pepper his face, with an impatient shrug more appropriate to wasps invading his picnic than the fact that his Aston Martin is being strafed by machinegun fire.

Craig’s 00 credentials are surely not in question since his sadistically efficient debut in the role in Casino Royale. His presence – and the competition offered by the bar-raising superiority of the Bourne series – reinvigorated a moribund franchise. For my book, he’s the most thrillingly dangerous Bond since Connery. And while Quantum of Solace, his second Bond outing, is rather less satisfying than his debut in the role, Craig delivers everything that the script requires with a cold, cruel panache.

Unfortunately, despite the presence of the Crash writer Paul Haggis on the credit list, the screenplay requires comparatively little from Craig, criminally underusing his talents. Granted, the many action sequences are dispatched with ruthless efficiency and an exponential body count – Judi Dench’s M looks on with a withering distaste as yet another suspect dies along with their secrets at Bond’s overzealous hands.

But where are the scenes that give us a glimpse of Bond the man rather than the ruthless killing machine? Where is the note of bruised vulnerability that underscored Craig’s performance in Casino Royale? Where are the loaded conversational battles of wit that allowed the audience – and Vesper Lynd – to really get under 007’s skin? It’s almost as if this film is relying on audiences to remember the emotional groundwork and characterisation set up in the previous movie.

Dialogue is stripped down to a minimum and employed mainly to explain the trajectory of the globe-hopping story line. There’s still a flicker of repartee between Bond and one of the women in his life, Dench’s fearsome M. But Bond’s coupling with Gemma Arterton’s hapless Agent Fields is mechanical, lacking any spark. And his common ground with the Bolivian agent Camille (Olga Kurylenko) extends little further than their mutual taste for violent retribution.

This instalment of the Bond franchise is lean, mean and all about the action. And, to give it credit, the action sequences are well executed. The director Marc Forster likes to juxtapose Bond’s daredevil running battles with scenes of drama from everyday life – the Palio di Siena horse race in one instance, and later the violent climax of the opera Tosca. It’s a neat technique. And the film could just about get away with high-octane thrills alone, were it not for one fatal flaw: the glaring and incongruous branding that crops up throughout the picture, most obviously for Virgin Atlantic.

Product placement may be a fact of life in big-budget film production but it’s ugly, crass and it devalues the artistic merits of the finished film.

15, 106 minutes

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