Daniel Craig stars as James Bond in Quantum

Battered and embittered, James Bond is back. Having earned his license to kill and lost the love of his life in “Casino Royale,” Daniel Craig’s 007 picks up the action where that film left off, scarcely pausing to reload.

Bond 22 begins with a furious car chase through Carrara’s marble quarries and rarely throttles back. “Quantum of Solace” is, as M describes Bond himself, “running wild.” With six major chase and fight sequences in the first hour alone, it’s actually rather exhausting. “Quantum” is among the shortest Bond films, and it feels like the longest.

In his second outing, Craig slips into Bond’s Savile Row tuxedoes and shoulder holsters with muscular authority. His hooded eyes and action-hero gymnastics are better suited than his predecessors’ witty elegance to the role of a government assassin. While the killer-cool essence of Bond remains, the character has evolved to keep pace with uncertain times.

This episode continues to redefine Bond as a weighty dramatic character. Gone are the cheesy gadgets, swooning beauties and tongue-in-cheek humor of decades gone by. This is a grim, semi-realistic Bond, a spiritual cousin to the dark, psychologically complex Jason Bourne and Batman. Bond still drinks his martinis, but drinks to excess, and doesn’t care how the barman makes them. They’re painkillers to numb his inconsolable rage over the assassination of his lover, Vesper Lynd, at the end of the previous film. In fact, Bond’s bed-hopping ways are significantly curtailed because he’s concerned about how often his girlfriends get killed. He’s human enough to sit for a few minutes with a dying colleague, then callously toss the body in a dumpster because “he wouldn’t care.”

In “Quantum of Solace,” Bond is motivated more by lust for vengeance than love of country. His search for Vesper’s killers takes him, at head-spinning speed, from Tuscany to London to Port-au-Prince, where he encounters creepy insolent Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, so riveting as the paralyzed antihero of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”). Presenting himself to the world as an idealistic eco-entrepreneur, Greene is plotting a natural resources grab in South America for Quantum, a shadowy organization that has compromised MI-6. Greene is a nasty piece of work, toppling democratic governments, selling off huge swaths of rainforest and abolishing minimum wage in sweatshop factories with an ease that would make the World Bank envious.

He’s also loathsome on a personal level, cruelly turning over his mistress Camille (Olga Kurylenko) to a Bolivian military strongman who will toss her off his yacht when he’s finished with her. Bond comes to her rescue in a spectacular boat chase and takes her as an on-again, off-again ally in his quest to penetrate Quantum, whose agents blackmailed and killed Vesper.

Why Bond latches on to Camille is hard to justify. He has known her for all of three minutes, during which time she tried to shoot him in the head. Is he trying to find closure by rescuing a woman in peril? Why would he trust this stranger when his last love betrayed him? For that matter, when Her Majesty’s spymasters revoke Bond’s passport, license to kill and credit cards, why does Bond turn to his double-dealing “Casino Royale” adversary Rene Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini) for aid?

The film makes such headlong leaps of motivation and locale that it would take a master spy to decipher why Bond is going where he goes and doing what he does. Craig powers ahead like an unstoppable killing machine, but a vital part of Bond’s capabilities is slighted here. In earlier films, Bond’s ability to extract information about his enemies’ schemes kept the globetrotting plots on track. Here, with an overdose of stunts and a trickle of exposition, we’re mystified.

Perhaps that’s intentional. Marc Forster (director of such art house hits as “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland”) focuses on the homicidal spy’s alienation and paranoia. He is most energized by sequences that tie Bond’s vendetta to his coldly repressed bereavement and fury.

A highlight is a scene that intercuts Bond’s fights with Quantum henchmen with “Tosca” arias about love and revenge being sung at an Austrian opera house, a tip of the hat to the christening/massacre scene at the finale of “The Godfather.” The script, co-written by Paul Haggis (“Crash,” “Letters From Iwo Jima”) views 21st-century spy craft as an exercise in John le Carre-style moral relativism. Giannini, playing an agent at the end of his career, delivers the thesis statement: “The heroes and villains get mixed up as you get older.” M’s Judi Dench receives a lecture from her superior that Britain and the United States will support dictators so long as it keeps the oil flowing.

Bond can’t be certain who to trust. When he accidentally kills a fellow MI-6 agent, he shrugs off the death as the sort of mistake that happens in murky waters. “When you can’t tell your friends from your enemies it’s time to go,” barks Dench. As “Quantum of Solace” raced frenetically ahead, its narrative as puzzling as its title, I felt the same.y>