Casino Royal

Released: December 7
Rated: M
Director: Martin Campbell
Screenwriters: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade
Starring: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Ivana Milicevic, Caterina Murino
Running time: 144 minutes

Plot: Newly promoted 00 (and ace poker-player) James Bond (Craig) is charged with bringing down the terrorist banker, Le Chiffre (Mikkelsen). Having lost his clients’ money, Le Chiffre plans to win it back at a poker game in Montenegro. M (Dench) agrees to fund Bond’s entry into the game, but assigns the alluring Vesper Lynd (Green) to keep an eye on the money.

Any enduringly successful franchise has to reinvent itself periodically to remain relevant and attractive. In Casino Royale, Martin Campbell has given Bond the ‘Deli Choices’ makeover — again.

Campbell helmed GoldenEye, the first Bond outing with Pierce Brosnan and Judi Dench, which rescued the series from post-Cold War insignificance. To my mind, the post-9/11 (and -Abu Ghraib) climate had seemed more suited to the likes of Jason Bourne and Evey Hammond. But it turns out that it is also the perfect setting to rebirth Bond, and Campbell is an able midwife.
In Casino Royale, he takes us back to the beginning, creating a grittier, more realistic world for Bond to inhabit, even as all our hero’s familiar trademarks are revealed — Aston Martin, vodka martinis, tuxedo, silenced pistol, muted brassy theme music, witty quips, and misogyny.

There is a grainy, black-and-white pre-credits sequence with a luscious soundscape that sets the film’s visceral tone, as well as hinting at the innovative feel of the remodelled Bondiverse. The credits play over stylized gore and Mandelbrot, then we’re thrust into an awesome parkour set-piece that is at once familiar and refreshing.

This chase through a Ugandan market, construction site, and finally embassy is familiar insofar as it has its moments of over-the-top incredibility. But it is innovative in that we realize that this new Bond is not Superman — his hair can be messed up; he can have the wind knocked out of him, not to mention his teeth.

Despite all the pre-release naysaying, Craig is the perfect choice for Bond. A proper thesp, his capacity to play both intense and light has been ably demonstrated in The Power of One, Road to Perdition, and Munich. His bulkier physique and piercing eyes capture the essential qualities of Bond in a way perhaps no actor has before: he looks like he could kill you with his bare hands, and yet he remains eminently beddable.

Regrettably, Eva Green seems to miss the mark somewhat as Vesper Lynd. As in her previous English-language outing, Kingdom of Heaven, she looks stunning, but fails to render her character believable.

Craig’s performance grounds the emotional and character arcs of the film, but the narrative seems more like a sequence of vignettes than a coherent story. This creates pacing problems, as we lurch from plot-turn to spectacular set-piece, never quite sure which characters we’re supposed to focus on, or where the climax is. In the end, we need M’s exposition to make sense of it all.

These flaws are not fatal, however, because ultimately this is a film about James Bond. Yes, there are some tongue-in-cheek nods to the cheesiness of the score of films that precede it — Solange’s (Murino) horseback entry being perhaps the most ludicrous — but for the franchise to continue, Casino Royale must help us to understand and so empathize with Bond, whom in GoldenEye M rightly characterized as a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War”. Craig has both the acting chops and the physical sizzle to make it happen.

Verdict: With a physically and emotionally vulnerable star, Casino Royale gives the Bond franchise a bright future.