dir: Martin Campbell
[img_assist|nid=851|title=More brutish than hoity-toity, this time around|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=365]
Around the time of the last Bond film Die Another Day, some horrified viewers were calling for the death of this tired, smelly franchise. The name had become so devalued by a long string of mediocre movies that it seemed kinder to just let it die. Or to put it out of its misery.
Of course there isn’t a studio on the planet that would rather go with a new idea over an old faithful cliche, so a new Bond film was an inevitability in the same way that night follows day, or when any celebrity videotapes themselves in a compromising position or two, the footage invariably ends up on the internet.
At the very least, if they’re going to make more of these Bond films, let them be as good as this.
Casino Royale is a rip-roaring old school adventure and a pleasure to watch from start to finish, even if it does drag a bit. That hasn’t been said honestly about a Bond film for decades. Daniel Craig plays the famous agent with the right mixture of cool professionalism and brutality. This Bond is less of a gentleman and more of a bastard than we’ve seen for a while, and the movie is the better for it.
Like the recent Batman Begins, Casino Royale is supposed to reboot the franchise from scratch. There are ample references to the more famous elements and characters, and of the former casts Judi Dench (that’s DAME Judi Dench to the likes of you) is the only one to return as the icy spymaster M. But mostly it’s a case of taking what is known about Her Majesty’s favourite spy and abandoning what no longer works to come up with something that hopefully audiences are going to love again.
Daniel Craig wears the Bond mantle this time around, and it suits him well. Here they take Bond back to his basic origins and unleash him upon a world that is a good deal messier than the days of cyanide tipped umbrellas and tarantula assassins.
Terrorism punctuates every news broadcast, so it would make sense that it plays a major part here too. After a sterling black and white intro showing how Bond gets his double O status, we see him chasing down a bomb-maker in Madagascar (which is really the Bahamas). The evil bomb-maker, who isn’t there for the dialogue, is played by Sebastien Foucan, one of the veterans of the strange martial art known as parkour.
It is the art, or skill of using one’s body and the urban environment, to get around, over or through obstacles. It’s been used in a few ads recently to promote everything from those ubiquitous sports products put together by child labour in developing countries to Playstations. Of course there’s CGI and safety harnesses used throughout the sequence, but some of the stunt work is still jaw-dropping.
As unbelievable as the construction site chase sequence seems, it still comes across as marginally more believable than the average Bond stunts in recent years, which have consisted of outrunning giant satellite laser beams and fighting North Koreans whose DNA has been warped into making them look like Anglo-Saxons whilst wearing electrified body armour.
So if they’ve decided to be a bit more down-to-earth, even when characters are jumping from crane to crane a thousand feet above the ground, then it’s to their credit and to the film’s benefit.
The main story governs the attempts by a mathematical genius called Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelson) to make a killing on the stock market, and to win a game of high-stakes poker at the location bearing the film’s name in Montenegro. As villains go he’s very cold and vicious, but lacks the megalomaniacal edge that would make him memorable. Bond’s job is to win the game, stop international terrorism, and find a breakfast cereal that doesn’t cut the roof of his mouth.
As plots go, Royale has a pretty convoluted one, which is to be expected for a Bond film. Le Chiffre gets money from terrorists, someone wants to blow up a big plane, terrorists want their money back, a shadowy figure called Mr White represents some other nefarious group who wants the money, various governments get involved, and in the end we are left to ask the question: does any of it matter?
Of course not, but we can still be entertained along the way. The Bond character has been a kind of joke in recent years; maybe it has always been a bit of a joke. It is one of the purest silver screen male wish-fulfilment fantasies there is: oh to be a rugged man with unlimited financial resources flying around the world performing all sorts of stunts in exotic cars and having no-strings sex with stunning women in between killing people. If he’s lucky, he even gets to kill some of the women he has sex with!
Oh joy! As personas go, it’s easy to see why, in terms of audiences, women want to have his blue-eyed babies and men want to be him. But the same static character has been around for forty years, fifty if you count the books, so it was about due for a renovation.
Instead of radically reconfiguring him into being a metrosexual who solves crimes with the help of a magical goldfish, Bond here is pared back to the original from the book. Bond and his main squeeze in the film, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) deconstruct each other’s personas in what’s meant to be a devastating tit for tat argument on a train, but we know it’s really just foreplay. Her points about his origins are true to the character Ian Fleming wrote oh so long ago.
Vesper herself gets a little bit more screen time and dialogue than your average Bond groupie, but also plays a bit more of an important role in terms of defining the Bond character.
Love. All you need is love. Love is the drug. Love is a many splendoured thing. Bond falls in love with one of his fuckpuppets, you see, and that makes all the difference.
It’s easy to see why. Though she doesn’t spend anywhere near as much time naked in this flick as she did in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, she is just as exquisitely gorgeous and, let’s just say she looks pretty fine regardless of how much clothing she’s wearing. Her acting’s not bad either, which helps a bundle.
I don’t know whether I buy their relationship, or whether it matters, but hell, I’m not going to complain. I was so happy at enjoying this flick without cringing that I was prepared to tolerate a few scenes of people mumbling words of love that sound as painful to recite as they must have been to write.
On that score, the cringeworthy sexual innuendos and double entendres have been toned down immensely, which also helps. We no longer have to watch a 50 year old Bond serving up oily lines of sleaze to women young enough to babysit his many bastard children.
He still gets a lot of one-liners and delivers them well, especially a few that make no sense on paper such as “Considerably” and “You noticed”, which aren’t as cheesy as the awful puns Bond is usually spouting, but their success is more in the delivery than the writing.
The middle part of the film might seem like it would be teeth-pullingly slow, seeing as it focuses on a high stakes card game of Texas Hold’em, replacing the Baccarat of the original, but they still find ways to jack up the suspense with terrorist attacks, poisoning attempts and spectacular defibrillations on the fly.
The notorious scene of, shall we call it naked rope torture, is done as roughly as one might expect in a setting that would seem more appropriate to a recent horror movie like Hostel, and ends up having a pretty funny resolution.
There are downsides, as there must be in everything in life. The product placement is incredibly over the top. A scene where a character is lying on the road to cause a car accident doesn’t make sense. Some of the dialogue of people speaking in the lurve, wuv or shmoopy dialect (in other words, romantic dribblings) made me want to punch Buddha in the face. And it’s bloody long.
The film’s ends on an ambiguous note which points to the Further Adventures Of… which, after 144 minutes, might seem like a frustrating way to reward audiences for their patience. Still, it was an enjoyable ride, and as long as they keep the character evolving in some interesting ways, and resist the desire to make everything reliant upon gadgets, stupid puns and CGI, further films might be something to look forward to.
8 reasons why Casino Royale is a good film, at least compared to the last diabolical entry.
1) There is no Madonna in it, neither her awful music nor her awful head stinking up the joint.
2) Daniel Craig is a bad motherfucker, and a good actor, which is a heart-warming combination
3) The parkour stunts, which look like a young Jackie Chan on speed, are amazing
4) Eva Green is scrumptious.
5) The humour in the flick is such that you can laugh with the intentional jokes, instead of laughing at how desperate as a combovered man at an underage disco it is.
6) The conversations between M and Bond are perrrfect.
7) M’s line “Christ, I miss the Cold War” was priceless.
8) It was actually entertaining.
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Vodka Martini
- Shaken or stirred?
Does it look like I give a damn? – Casino Royale.
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