After more than 40 years and 20 films, Bond, James Bond was due a fresh take. So the producers decided to take the world’s most famous secret agent back to the beginning for his makeover. And, damn, was it an extreme one. Exit Pierce Brosnan, enter Daniel Craig, who received a lot of criticism from Bond fans who thought he was too blond to don the tuxedo and wield a license to kill. Truth be told, Craig eats Brosnan for lunch, which could help explain how Craig put on 20 pounds of muscle for the film. And while Craig is nowhere near as aristocratically debonair as Brosnan, the new Bond is gritty, charming and great fun to watch.
“Casino Royale” starts at the beginning, showing Bond’s first two kills that earn him his “double-oh” status. From there, Bond heads to Madagascar where, in an elaborate chase sequence, he shows that this isn’t your parents’ spy movie. Even though not everything goes according to plan (it is Bond’s first mission after all), he picks up information that leads him to Le Chiffre
(Mads Mikkelsen), a banker who makes sure terrorists earn a sound return on their investments.
Bond follows Le Chiffre to a high-stakes poker game at Le Casino Royale where MI6 (Britain’s CIA) gives Bond the $10 million buy-in to challenge the banker. Even though a poker match that takes up the bulk of the film’s midsection has the potential for being about as exciting as a poker match on television, director Martin Campbell pulls it off.
To make sure Bond doesn’t lose the government’s money, Vesper Lynd, a government accountant, accompanies him on the trip. Lynd, played by French actress Eva Green, is a refreshing take on the typical Bond girl: She’s intelligent and witty, yet vulnerable, and Bond quickly falls for her. She never even dons a bikini, which is probably a record for the series.
Near the beginning of the film, Bond’s boss, M (Judi Dench), laments to Bond that she misses the simplicity of the Cold War because the era of governments versus international terror organizations gets a little too complicated to follow. In the Cold War, the good guys always knew who the bad guys were, but since the Sept. 11 attacks, the clear chain of command that was so obvious in the communist baddies is considerably blurred among the terrorist cells.
The same thing goes for the plot of Craig’s maiden voyage starring as 007: The bad guys are out there, but without the help of a complex computer system like the one Bond uses to check up on his nemeses, the audience gets a little lost amid the minutiae of which terrorist is working for whom. But that doesn’t really matter, because Bond kicks the crap out of all of them anyway.
Despite the complexities, “Casino Royale” is far and away the best Bond film of the 21st century. From the ashes of the horrendously campy “Die Another Day,” Daniel Craig rises as a phoenix for the Bond franchise; the rebirth is exciting and satisfying, and James Bond is once again the coolest spy on the silver screen.
– Matt Tiffany