Search

Departments

Casino Royale

by Richard Keatley

Casino Royale

When Daniel Craig was named as the new James Bond, many scoffed. He was, they bleated, too blond; too dour; not as manly as Sean, not as suave as Roger, not as sexy as Piers.

Well, now that Casino Royale has hit the screens, those people can finally shut the hell up.

Bond is back, and he's a stone-cold, rock-hard psycho. In Craig's hands, the secret agent’s famous licence to kill is a passport to a darker, grittier world. In the opening scene, he beats another spy to death with bare, bloodied hands. And that is how this Bond is throughout the film: brawn as much as brain, violence in the name of duty, a ruthless assassin who just happens to be on our side.

Not that this isn't entertaining; it is - magnificently so. From an adrenaline-pumping free running foot-chase across the Madagascar skyline to a high-speed demolition derby at Miami Airport to a last-ditch shootout in Venice, this has all the expansive international action that Bond fans have come to expect. And the centrepiece of the film, a high stakes poker game in which Bond stands to lose millions of the British government’s money as well as his life, proves that director Martin Campbell does not need to rely on things exploding to keep his audience on the edge of their seats.

Craig’s performance is outstanding. But two other roles also determine the calibre of a Bond film: the villain and the girl. In Casino Royale, neither lets us down.

Mads Mikkelsen as the terrorist banker Le Chiffre is as intriguing as he is repulsive, a desperate thief willing to do anything to get himself off the hook.

Eva Green as the tragic Vesper Lynd is a sassy civil servant with a dark secret, an actual person rather than something to stand around making Bond look good.

There are, of course, changes that might not be so welcome to die-hard fans. Although Judi Dench reprises her role as ‘M’, there is no ‘Q’ to arm our hero with witty and wacky gadgets. Instead, Bond’s hi-tech equipment seems limited to whatever clumsy product placement the film-makers were forced into. At points it becomes laughably obvious that the focus of a shot isn’t Bond, or a villain, or anything even remotely related to the story; instead it’s a damned laptop or mobile phone. This disturbingly ham-fisted advertising distorts the film, but stops short of ruining it.

Go and see this film. Daniel Craig is the Bond that Ian Fleming wrote about. He makes Roger Moore look like Lionel Blair, and Piers Brosnan look like, well, Remington Steele.