Casino-royale movie trailer

On the big screen, Daniel Craig has shown himself fully capable of taking on a British icon: a man of cool, cruel determination, mesmerising sex appeal and a fatally destructive way with women. But that's enough about his performance as Ted Hughes. Now he has taken on the mantle of 007, and the result is a death-defying, sportscar-driving, female-back-fondling, cocktail-recipe-specifying triumph. Daniel Craig is a fantastic Bond, and all those whingers and nay-sayers out there in the blogosphere should hang their heads in shame .

Casino Royale movie images

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Casino Royale movie cast and crew

Directed by

Martin Campbell        



Daniel Craig   
   
Eva Green   
   
Mads Mikkelsen   
   
Judi Dench
   
Jeffrey Wright
   
Giancarlo Giannini   
   
Caterina Murino   

Simon Abkarian   

Isaach De Bankolé   

Jesper Christensen
   
Ivana Milicevic   
   
Tobias Menzies   

Casino Royale movie overview

On the big screen, Daniel Craig has shown himself fully capable of taking on a British icon: a man of cool, cruel determination, mesmerising sex appeal and a fatally destructive way with women. But that's enough about his performance as Ted Hughes. Now he has taken on the mantle of 007, and the result is a death-defying, sportscar-driving, female-back-fondling, cocktail-recipe-specifying triumph. Daniel Craig is a fantastic Bond, and all those whingers and nay-sayers out there in the blogosphere should hang their heads in shame.

Craig was inspired casting. He has effortless presence and lethal danger; he brings a serious actor's ability to a fundamentally unserious part; he brings out the playfulness and the absurdity, yet never sends it up. He's easily the best Bond since Sean Connery, and perhaps even - well, let's not get carried away. With Craig's unsmiling demeanour and his unfashionably, even faintly un-British dirty blond hair, he looks like a cross between the Robert Shaw who grappled with Bond in From Russia With Love and Patrick McGoohan's defiant Prisoner. The key to his X-factor is that Craig looks as if he would be equally at home playing a Bond villain.

This is the story of James Bond's beginning, transferred forward in time to a loosely imagined post-9/11 present. After a very nasty and violent killing in a men's room, shot in grainy monochrome, Bond earns his official double-0 rating with a second wet job: the unofficial whacking of a traitor in the higher reaches of MI6. His spurs earned, Bond must now tackle his first super-villain: Le Chiffre, banker to Smersh in the original, now accountant and financier to international terrorists everywhere, though al-Qaida and anyone else from the Middle East are coyly left unmentioned. M even implies that manipulating airline stock prices was a motivating factor for 9/11 - a sly piece of cynicism that would have amused Fleming himself.

The supremely silly idea is that Bond, that über-amateur card-player, will relieve Le Chiffre of all his money - and thus, the terrorists of all their resources - at a single high-rollers' card game, although the game is not chemin de fer, but a rather more déclassé one of poker. Le Chiffre is played by Mads Mikkelsen, in which role he has the privilege of following Orson Welles from the 1967 spoof version.

The Treasury official accompanying Bond to the casino and fronting up zillions of pounds of taxpayer's cash is the slinky Miss Vesper Lynd, played by Eva Green, who speaks English in a residual French accent that makes her sound permanently sarky. Despite the big hair, she is no run-of-the-mill Bond girl; with her Olympic-standard embonpoint and inverted triangle face, she has a sexy head-girl haughtiness, and the many close-ups of her tensely appalled expression by the card table make it look as if she has witnessed Bond dissecting a frog on the green baize.

This is not exactly back-to-basics Bond. The franchise is still apparently stuck with branding and concealed advertising, as well as the naff euro-trash hotels, with receptionists who get their plug in - "Welcome to the Hotel Splendide!" - as plonkingly as they used to greet the winning couples on TV's Blind Date in the 1980s. There is even a subliminal glimpse of that chief blagger of product placements, Sir Richard Branson. M is Dame Judi Dench, splendidly icy and disapproving, yet caring. And though Bond wins a vintage Aston Martin (without ejector seat) in a card game, it's not a very gadgety movie, excepting all those mobiles and laptops with their impossibly lightning-fast graphics and streaming video.

As far as Bond's erotic life goes, the movie retains one important element from Fleming's 1953 novel: Bond gets tortured - in the nude! - by Le Chiffre, who whips his scrotum with knotted rope after commenting that he has "looked after his body". It's a gamey scene that has caused generations of Bond readers to nurse and then uneasily suppress certain wonderings about the nature of 007's fanbase. These wonderings will not, I have to say, be quashed by Daniel Craig's pert swimming costume. But Craig strikes some very erotic sparks from Vesper Lynd, with some loaded bantering over dinner in a first-class railway compartment, and finally, from him, a dead-straight passionate declaration of love. Sweetly, Bond doesn't have sex with anyone else in the film. Vesper is to break his heart, though, and the movie cleverly shows that all Bond's mannerisms and steely reserve grow from this prehistory of doomed romance.

It is all ridiculously enjoyable, because the smirking and the quips and the gadgets have been cut back - and the emotion and wholesome sado-masochism have been pumped up. My only regret is that the classic Barry theme tune is saved for the closing credits. Mr Craig brings off cinema's most preposterous role with insouciant grit: I hope he doesn't quit too soon. I'd like see the next few films tackle 007's off-duty life more: his hangovers, his money worries. Daniel Craig could make it work. For the first time in ages, I am actually looking forward to the next James Bond movie.

Casino Royale movie review

The latest James Bond vehicle — call him Bond, Bond 6.0 — finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker. Now played by an attractive bit of blond rough named Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan having been permanently kicked to the kerb, Her Majesty’s favorite bad boy arrives on screens with the usual complement of cool toys, smooth rides, bosomy women and high expectations. He shoots, he scores, in bed and out, taking down the bad and the beautiful as he strides purposefully into the 21st century.

It’s about time. The likable Mr. Brosnan was always more persuasive playing Bond as a metaphoric rather than an actual lady-killer, with the sort of polished affect and blow-dried good looks that these days tend to work better either on television or against the grain. Two of his best performances have been almost aggressively anti-Bond turns, first in John Boorman’s adaptation of the John le Carré novel “The Tailor of Panama,” in which he played a dissolute spy, and, more recently, in “The Matador,” a comedy in which he played a hit man with a sizable gut and alarmingly tight bikini underwear. Mr. Brosnan did not demolish the memory of his Bond years with that pot, but he came admirably close.

Every generation gets the Bond it deserves if not necessarily desires, and with his creased face and uneasy smile, Mr. Craig fits these grim times well. As if to underscore the idea that this new Bond marks a decisive break with the contemporary iterations, “Casino Royale” opens with a black-and-white sequence that finds the spy making his first government-sanctioned kills. The inky blood soon gives way to full-blown color, but not until Bond has killed one man with his hands after a violent struggle and fatally shot a second. “Made you feel it, did he?” someone asks Bond of his first victim. Bond doesn’t answer. From the way the director, Martin Campbell, stages the action though, it’s clear that he wants to make sure we do feel it.

“Casino Royale” introduced Bond to the world in 1953. A year later it was made into a television drama with the American actor Barry Nelson as Jimmy Bond; the following decade, it was a ham-fisted spoof with David Niven as the spy and a very funny Peter Sellers as a card shark. For reasons that are too boring to repeat, when Ian Fleming sold the film rights to Bond, “Casino Royale” was not part of the deal. As a consequence the producers who held most of the rights decided to take their cue from news reports about misfired missiles, placing their bets on “Dr. No” and its missile-mad villain. The first big-screen Bond, it hit in October 1962, the same month that Fleming’s fan John F. Kennedy took the Cuban missile crisis public.

The Vatican later condemned “Dr. No” as a dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.

Ka-ching! The film was a success, as was its relatively unknown star, Sean Connery, who balanced those descriptive notes beautifully, particularly in the first film and its even better follow-up, “From Russia With Love.”

In time Mr. Connery’s conception of the character softened, as did the series itself, and both Roger Moore and Mr. Brosnan portrayed the spy as something of a gentleman playboy. That probably helps explain why some Bond fanatics have objected so violently to Mr. Craig, who fits Fleming’s description of the character as appearing “ironical, brutal and cold” better than any actor since Mr. Connery. Mr. Craig’s Bond looks as if he has renewed his license to kill.

Like a lot of action films, the Bond franchise has always used comedy to blunt the violence and bring in big audiences. And, much like the franchise’s increasingly bloated action sequences, which always seem to involve thousands of uniformed extras scurrying around sets the size of Rhode Island, the humor eventually leached the series of its excitement, its sense of risk. Mr. Brosnan certainly looked the part when he suited up for “GoldenEye” in 1995, but by then John Woo and Quentin Tarantino had so thoroughly rearranged the DNA of the modern action film as to knock 007 back to zero. By the time the last Bond landed in 2002, Matt Damon was rearranging the genre’s elementary particles anew in “The Bourne Identity.”

“Casino Royale” doesn’t play as dirty as the Bourne films, but the whole thing moves far lower to the ground than any of the newer Bond flicks. Here what pops off the screen aren’t the exploding orange fireballs that have long been a staple of the Bond films and have been taken to new pyrotechnic levels by Hollywood producers like Jerry Bruckheimer, but some sensational stunt work and a core seriousness. Successful franchises are always serious business, yet this is the first Bond film in a long while that feels as if it were made by people who realize they have to fight for audiences’ attention, not just bank on it. You see Mr. Craig sweating (and very nice sweat it is too); you sense the filmmakers doing the same.

The characteristically tangled shenanigans — as if it mattered — involve a villainous free agent named Le Chiffre (the excellent Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen), who wheels and deals using money temporarily borrowed from his equally venal clients. It’s the sort of risky global business that allows the story to jump from the Bahamas to Montenegro and other stops in between as Bond jumps from plot point to plot point, occasionally taking time out to talk into his cellphone or bed another man’s wife. Mr. Craig, whose previous credits include “Munich” and “The Mother,” walks the walk and talks the talk, and he keeps the film going even during the interminable high-stakes card game that nearly shuts it down.

If Mr. Campbell and his team haven’t reinvented the Bond film with this 21st edition, they have shaken (and stirred) it a little, chipping away some of the ritualized gentility that turned it into a waxworks. They have also surrounded Mr. Craig with estimable supporting players, including the French actress Eva Green, whose talent is actually larger than her breasts.

Like Mr. Mikkelsen, who makes weeping blood into a fine spectator sport, Ms. Green brings conviction to the film, as do Jeffrey Wright and Isaach de Bankolé. Judi Dench is back as M, of course, with her stiff lip and cunning. But even she can’t steal the show from Mr. Craig, though a human projectile by the name of Sébastien Foucan, who leads a merry and thrilling chase across Madagascar, almost does.