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My wife and I watched the new James Bond film Quantum of Solace a week or so ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. As you might guess from my frequent references to Bond, I am a fan of the franchise–and while I occasionally miss the humor and campiness of the Roger Moore movies, I overwhelmingly approve of the franchise reboot. The series badly needed more realistic villains and a darker, more dangerous Bond, and the last two movies have delivered.

As good as Quantum of Solace was, though, all of its goodness was nearly unraveled by Ford’s product placement whitewash. It didn’t start out badly–the movie began with a thrilling car chase that featured Bond piloting a gorgeous Aston Martin. Even setting aside from Bond’s history with the marque, Aston Martin is the perfect Bond car–muscular, debonair, slightly threatening, and thoroughly English. Aside from the fact that the company is owned by Ford, of course. (EDIT: Partially owned by Ford, that is. Ford sold all but a small stake last year. Thanks to the commenters for reminding me–I thought Ford still had a bigger stake.)

Likewise, I could buy that Bond would drive a Land Rover–it is a believable Bond vehicle, especially for off-road situations. Again, Land Rover is a Ford property. I even enjoyed the novelty of seeing a motorcycle chasing down an electric subcompact–a electric subcompact Ford Ka, naturally. 

Unfortunately, it went downhill from there. As the movie went on, the Ford placement got more and more blatant, to the point where we saw the evil mastermind being driven around in a convoy of black Ford Edges. I don’t have anything against the Edge–it’s a nice-looking mid-size SUV–but I have difficulty accepting it as the preferred vehicle of an impossibly wealthy and powerful villain. I mean, this is a guy who pals around with powerful generalissimos at lavish parties and pulls the strings of the rich and powerful. And he’s chauffeured in a Ford Edge? Really? If it must be a Ford product, why not another Land Rover? Or a Jaguar? Or why not get wacky and put the villain in a Maverick Grabber?

This may not seem like a big deal, but to a car guy, a Bond movie featuring only Ford products is like a drama movie featuring only people who, for no good reason, are all dressed in identical red leotards. It’s completely unreal in a way that is incredibly distracting and destroys my willingness to suspend disbelief. And while it’s true that these movies are packed with unrealistic events, excessive product placement is an unreality that actually undermines the movie’s plot. By the end of the movie I cared less about what was going on with Bond and more about wondering which Ford product would show up next.

My wife is a noted automotive agnostic. Unless it’s a Volvo 240 or Jeep Cherokee, she actually goes out of her way to not know or care about cars. When even she noticed and commented on the preponderance of Fords in Quantum of Solace, I knew it was excessive.

Even so, this isn’t the most gratuitous example of automotive product placement I’ve seen, or even the most over-the-top Bond movie placement. My picks are below, but I’m sure I’ve missed some classics.

Most Gratuitous Movie Placement

The level of automotive product placement in The Matrix Reloaded completely dwarfs the Ford marathon in Quantum of Solace. In fact, it’s not even close.

The Matrix in the film is a virtual reality created by our computer overlords that serves as a mental cage for the human race. It’s not related to the Toyota Matrix, though whenever I ride in my friend’s Toyota Matrix I have to suppress my desire to beatbox electronic music and speak like Lawrence Fishburne.

There is a scene in Reloaded, the second movie of the trilogy, in which some of our heroes are caught in the Matrix and pursued on a virtual freeway by various evil computer programs in the form of human-looking bad guys. Of course, mayhem ensues. The 10-minute-long freeway chase is an astonishingly ambitious action set-piece, it’s fantastically entertaining, and … every car involved is a GM vehicle.

Yes, that’s right–about 10 minutes of movie time are completely dominated by GM products.Our heroes drive a Cadillac CTS; they are pursued by a Cadillac Escalade EXT and a bunch of Chevrolet police cars. The police cars are particularly unlikely–some are ancient Caprice Classics, and the rest are the too-small 2000-2005 Impalas that weren’t particularly beloved by police departments. The rest of the cars on the freeway are Saturn wagons, Oldsmobile Intrigues, Pontiac Grand Ams, Chevy trucks and SUVs, minivans–virtually the entire GM catalog is represented. There are a few older GM products as well–an older Chevy pickup, and, as the prominent “outsider” car driven by some other good guys, a first-generation classic Pontiac Firebird.

I didn’t exactly do a frame-by-frame review, but I have watched the video intently a few times now. Non-GM cars show up before the chase reaches the freeway; and once on the freeway we see some semi trucks, a prominently displayed Ducati motorcycle, and a Dodge Ram pickup that sticks out like a sore thumb. Otherwise, though, it’s all GM.

The real world is populated by lots of different types of cars–different makes, different models, different ages, different conditions. A freeway filled with only new GM products is completely unnatural. And it’s not just a few cars–a little research turns up the fact that GM donated 300 vehicles for use in the scene, and I believe it.

As with the Ford placement in Quantum, the whole thing is incredibly unlikely and, for me, horribly distracting. I can almost give the Matrix a pass because it’s meant to be unreal–a computer-generated representation of the real world created to enslave humanity. But even this doesn’t hold much water. Are we supposed to believe our computer overlords are only capable of rendering GM cars? If so, the Matrix is an even more horrifying place than previously imagined.

Unintended Consequence: I’m not sure this is what GM was going for, but if the producers wanted to pick bland, generic cars to blend into the background, early 2000s GM vehicles were the perfect choice.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an all-GM freeway–In researching the Reloaded placement, I stumbled across a post describing an all-1973 Chevy Caprice freeway in the James Bond movie Live and Let Die. As you can see in the image, it’s also wildly unnatural, though given my automotive tastes I find it completely fantastic.

If a freeway populated with Oldsmobile Silhouettes and Pontiac Grand Ams is hell for a person like me, a freeway filled with 1970s Impalas and Caprices is clearly heaven. If they were going for blatant unreality, why didn’t the producers of The Matrix Reloaded choose to fill their freeway with 1973 Caprices? That at least would have been highly original.

The Matrix Reloaded freeway chase scene is broken into two sections below. Caution–the videos feature mature language, violence, offensive product placement, and a whole lot of assorted Matrix-related weirdness.

Most Gratuitous TV Placement

My wife and I were huge fans of the TV show Alias–its action, wackiness, and anything-goes mythology made it a gripping show into which we could totally sink ourselves. Thanks to the magic of TV on DVD, we would watch episode after episode, sinking ourselves into the entertaining espionage and counter-espionage of Sydney Bristow and her partner in crime prevention, Michael Vaughan.

That is, until we came across the 14th episode of the third season–Blowback. A few minutes into the episode, Sydney and Vaughan were chasing down some faceless double agents, one of which, unbeknownst to Vaughan, was Vaughan’s wife. The pursuit led Sydney and Vaughan through a building, up the stairs, and into the top level of a parking garage, at which point they see the bad guys screaming away in a stolen Ford Mustang.

Sydney looks around and chirps, “Quick, get the F-150!”* The camera then zooms in on the F-150 fender logo before the burly F-150 pushes some other cars out of the way (other Fords, of course) and sets off in chase.

This was the apparent culmination to a season-long plot thread, a dramatic moment bringing to a head Vaughan’s wife’s betrayal and potentially revealing to our heroes the shadowed enemy they had been chasing for the previous 13 episodes.

“Quick, get the F-150!?” Really? That’s the best they could do in that situation? With that one line and the camera zoom on the F-150 logo, the producers took a blowtorch both to their own credibility and to our willingness to suspend our disbelief for this show.

In the moments after Sydney uttered that infamous and completely unlikely line, my wife and I shared a moment of shocked silence and then at least 30 seconds of derisive laughter. I understand that when the episode aired on broadcast TV, a Ford F-150 commercial led off every commercial break–we would have greeted those commercials with the same cynical laughter.

We continued to watch Alias, but we never felt quite the same about the show after that moment. As with Bond and the Matrix movies, I was used to dealing with unreality in Alias; it’s part of the show’s appeal. But this unreality had nothing to do with the show’s mythology or quirky charm. The producers had put an advertisement above their viewers and the credibility of their own show.

And, to be honest, the placement did the F-150 no favors in our household either. It’s not as if I am in the F-150 target demographic anyway, but now there’s no way I will never buy one. And even if I did, I know my wife would ridicule me with “Quick, get the F-150!” jokes before every trip to the supermarket.

Unintended Consequences: First, Ford products are apparently incredibly easy to steal. Second, the Mustang is evidently worthless as a performance car. The Mustang has a lot of apparent advantages over an F-150 in a parking garage race–lighter weight, more power, better handling–and in this case, the Mustang had a head start of at least 20-30 seconds. Yet the F-150 caught it within seconds. Why would I want to buy a muscle car that performs so much more poorly than a full-size pickup truck? If Ford had really been thinking, they would have put the baddies in a Camaro and let viewers draw their own conclusions.

I am a helpful guy, and so I have been thinking of three acceptable alternate scenarios that would have salvaged the show’s credibility.

1. Play up the absurdity of the placement

In this case, one way to rescue the absurd it to make it so over-the-top that it’s clear the producers and writers are as disgusted as the viewer.

For example, Vaughan could have stared right into the camera and said in a deadpan voice, “Absolutely, Sydney, and it’s a great choice. After all, the F-150 has been America’s best-selling vehicle since 1992.”

Also acceptable would have been the absurdly specific reference (”Quick! Get the F-150 Extended Cab Harley Davidson Edition with the 5.4-liter Triton V-8!”) or a reference to an old car whose sales don’t benefit Ford at all (”Quick! Get the Ford Escort EXP!”).

2. Ridicule the placement

In this scenario, after Sydney chirps, “Quick! Get the F-150!” Vaughan stops running and fixes Sydney with a silent, derisive, mocking stare for a minimum of 30 long seconds. Ideally, Sydney flushes with shame under Vaughan’s reproachful stare, and she looks completely deflated as they silently get into a different, non-Ford vehicle.

This is probably my favorite of the three alternate scenarios.

3. The placement works out poorly

Sydney and Vaughan jump into the F-150, but they lag badly behind the Mustang. They pull to a stop after losing the Mustang, defeated with the knowledge that selecting a pickup truck to follow a performance car through a parking garage was an abjectly awful idea.

Part of the episode in question is archived in the video below; skip ahead to the 2:50 mark to see the moment of shame

* Video review shows that she actually just said “The F-150!”, but I prefer my version.

–Chris H.