>>REVIEW
CASINO ROYALE
STARRING: Daniel Craig, Eva Green and Judi Dench
DIRECTED BY: Martin Campbell
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It isn’t until the very last frame of Casino Royale that Daniel Craig looks at a bleeding victim (and the theatre’s audience) to inform us that he is, in fact, Bond. James Bond. And though, normally, we would have expected to see Bond identify himself to a cocktail waitress far earlier, the latest genesis of the Bond franchise has brought us so skilfully to the finished product that capping the whole affair with the super spy’s most iconic line is absolutely fitting.
When we first meet Craig’s Bond-to-be, he is "double O" nothing, not having killed the requisite two targets. In black-and-white, we watch as he progresses from brutally killing a contact in a bathroom to the cold calculation of a silenced pistol. From there, it’s a traditional Bond-style globe trot, from an African chase sequence that contrasts Bond’s still-sloppy style with a parkour (free-running) bomb maker, to an airport bomb threat and finally to the titular Montenegrin hotel where Bond must compete in a poker tournament against a terrorist banker named Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen).
With its main villain a stock market-manipulating banker motivated by greed and self-preservation, with a scarred eye that occasionally weeps blood, Casino Royale adeptly mixes traditional Bond fare with a brutality that doesn’t have room for laser pens. In addition to returning the franchise to its less tech-heavy roots (Dr. No, From Russia With Love), director Martin Campbell’s emphasis on a Bond that still goes in guns ’a’ blazin’ – for which the hulking Craig is masterfully cast – shows us Bond’s progression into the debonair spy we know and love.
The ladies love Bond too, of course, and just as the film traces his journey into super spydom, it also shows how the man is just so damned cold to the women who love him. It’s only in the brief, final act love story where Bond brings the sexual tension between him and the banker in charge of MI-6’s money (played by the achingly pretty Eva Green) that the film’s perfect pace stumbles at an obvious and inevitable plot twist. Thankfully, the wait until the next excessive action scene is short. Kaboom!
Though Die Another Day, Casino Royale’s 2002 predecessor, was the highest grossing Bond film of all time, the sense that the series had yet again jumped a shark with head-mounted lasers was impossible to deny. But with a more brutal Bond and a return to basics, the franchise has been given a revitalizing shot in the arm with all the force of a punch in the face. |
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