Casino Royale

CASINO ROYALE
SONY
RELEASED 17 November 2006
As the filmmakers have told us twenty times before, ‘James Bond Will Return’, and the twenty-first movie introduces us to a twenty-first century secret agent who is darker and grittier than any that has gone before. This is Bond before he gained his double-0 status, at least before the opening five minutes are over. On his first mission, tailing a bombmaker in Madagascar, 007 gets caught up in a thrilling chase through a building site that sees the villian jumping through tiny spaces in the style of Parkour (free running) while Bond has a more direct style, crashing through walls and using any tools at his disposal. This major action sequence also gets back to the great Bond tradition of real stuntwork with some genuinely vertigo-inducing aerial action atop two cranes. No silly computer-generated surfing here (see the guilty ‘Die Another Day – file away alongside ‘invisible car’). Daniel Craig’s Bond really gets bruised and battered from the off, and all the movie’s fight sequences are brutal. Craig has been quoted as saying ‘if you don’t get hurt, you’re not doing it properly’ and it’s clear he’s put himself through more risk than any previous incumbent of the 007 mantle. Another major sequence on the Miami airport runway sees a ‘Raider of the Lost Ark’-style fist fight inside a moving petrol truck bound for detonation.
The storyline is pretty slim, with the British Secret Service attempting to stop a terrorist called Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) from winning back millions of dollars he owes and thus offering him protection in exchange for information on his superiors. It’s down to Bond, apparently the best Poker player in the service, to beat Le Chiffre at the table and force him into MI6’s arms. If Bond loses, not only does Le Chiffre get away, but the British Government will have directly financed terrorism. The poker scenes in the casino (Royale) are well-played and quite tense considering you can pretty much guess in whose favour the game will turn.
With the ‘rebooting’ of the Bond legend and the focus on realistic action, there is now no Q (or even ‘R’, thank God) and therefore no gadgets. Judi Dench’s M returns, which is slightly confusing seeing as she told Brosnan’s Bond he was a dinosaur from the cold war in ‘Goldeneye’, and now grants Bond double-0 status in the present day.
The script is very good without resorting to many Bond quips, but when they do come, they get a big laugh. The two ‘Bond girls’ are excellent, with Eva Green as Treasury accountant Vesper Lynd really giving 007 a run for his money. David Arnold composes his best score since his debut ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ and he incorporates the theme song ‘You Know My Name’ (by Chris Cornell) sweepingly into many parts of the movie.
So the most important question is: how does Daniel Craig’s Bond fare against the previous five? Well on this evidence, he is the best actor to ever play the part (that includes Connery), and if future films are as good as he is, we could be in for a golden age of Bond. However, bear in mind that Brosnan started his tenure with the excellent ‘Goldeneye’, but the films deteriorated as his performances improved, until the franchise was once more veering into ‘camp-Roger Moore’ territory.
Intriguingly, for the first time, a Bond film ends unresolved, so now James Bond must ‘return’.
FOUR OUT OF FIVE