Week of November 15, 2006, Issue #578
FILM
Craig's Bond is not shaken or stirred
DAVID BERRY / david@vueweekly.com
One of the many benefits of franchising in movies is that you no longer have to compete with anyone outside your own canon; Bond movies have been Bond movies since From Russia With Love, and even the most pathetic, limp entries (say, anything made between 1979 and 1989) might get eviscerated when compared to the classics, but don’t have to worry about standing up to the whatever’s going on around it.So, as an action movie to itself, Casino Royale could at best be called a talented mimic; the newest Bond owes almost as much to the Bourne series as it does to its own heritage, borrowing on the other series’ messy, gritty, cuffed-across-the-face aesthetic and putting it in a tailored tux. But hey: replacing a mostly bland protagonist with a man who has ice vodka running through his veins and melts slinky cocktail dresses with a raised eyebrow? Top drawer.
Anyone who had doubts about Daniel Craig’s ability to Bond can help themselves to Odd Job’s steel-tipped hat: everything you could look for in 007 is on ample display, quite literally: Craig is definitely the only Bond whose chest gets more screen time than his female counterparts’, not that 21st-edition babe Eva Green doesn’t put in a valiant effort on that front.
Craig also manages to drop one-liners without the self-consciousness of Connery or the smart-assity of Moore or Brosnan, and he has a human touch that’s more or less been lacking since the get-go. The martinis-and-silencers bit comes across as even more menacing and, frankly, awesome, when Bond doesn’t seem so superhumanly suave; it’s like he’s earned his right to seduce and destroy, as opposed to being given it.
The story, of course, is at its heart pure Bond cheese, but director Martin Campbell—he who was earlier responsible for the other franchise-saver, GoldenEye, and who probably deserves a chance to not watch his work sink into oblivion again—does a fairly solid job of scuffing it up the point of believability.
Banker to the international terrorist stars, Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen)—a dude bad enough to have a cut over his eye that causes him to cry blood on occasion—loses a ton of terrorist money in the stock market (Bond foils his attempted fix) and organizes a poker game to try and get some back. Bond must go to Casino Royale in picturesque Montenegro to kill people, invent his signature drink, get the shit kicked out of him, and ultimately win the game in an effort to bring Le Chiffre in, for access to his terrorist clients. How all that goes is left to your imagination.
The one complaint might be that they try a little too hard to get Bonds’ hands dirty: the filmmakers remind you this isn’t killing with the cocktail gloves on at every turn—such as the opening chase, which eschews skis or cars for a wall-crashing, dirt-spitting chase through a Madagascar town—and it gets a little thick as the film wears on (though this should come as no surprise, since one of the credited writers is hammer-handed Paul Haggis).
Most of the choices here, though, are welcome changes, either from Bond lore or accepted convention. They generally resist the prequel urge to constantly throw in knowing winks at “what’s to come”—the few thrown in are handled with a smoothness befitting Bond—and explosions and gadgetry mostly give way to tight, messy fight sequences and Bond using his wits, borrowed from Bourne but nonetheless a welcome update to the watch bombs of yore.
In the end, like the best of the Bond films, Casino Royale works because it manages to transcend its franchise. It’s a fantastic Bond film, but more importantly a smart, funny, taught action film, and that’s reason enough as any to look forward to the man so nice he says him name twice. V
Opens Fri, Nov 7
Casino Royale
Directed by Martin Campbell
Written by Neil Purvis, Paul Haggis,
Robert Wade
Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green,
Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench