director
Martin Campbell
screenwriters
Neal Purvis
Robert Wade
Paul Haggis
based
on the novel by
Ian Fleming
producers
Barbara Broccoli
Michael G. Wilson
cinematographer
Phil Meheux
music
David Arnold
editor
Stuart Baird
cast
Daniel Craig (James Bond)
Eva Green (Vesper Lynd)
Mads Mikkelsen (Le Chiffre)
Judi Dench (M)
Jeffrey Wright (Felix Leiter)
Giancarlo Giannini (Mathis)
Caterina Murino (Solange)
Simon Abkarian (Alex Dimitrios)
Isaach De Bankolé (Steven Obanno)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 144m
u.s.
release: 11/17/06
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other james
bond films
reviewed on this website:
- die another day
- goldeneye
- tomorrow never dies
- the world
is not enough
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Bond is back -- sort of. In
Casino Royale, the new "reboot" of the
long-running 007 series, the idea is that we're picking up James
Bond (Daniel Craig now) at the start of his double-oh career.
So he bleeds, he lets his emotions get in the way, he's basically
a human learning to be inhuman. Abstractly, all of this is interesting,
and probably necessary to get away from the bloated decadence
that the Bond films had become. But, as it turns out, some of
that decadence was fun. For whatever reason, the 007 series
has been trending away from fun since at least the Timothy
Dalton days, and now, with Casino Royale, there's
virtually no fun left. Congratulations, I guess?
None of this is Daniel Craig's
fault. He's got the dead-eyed ruthlessness of Bond down pat,
and he's easily the most robust and athletic Bond since Sean
Connery. Craig steps into the role with no fuss, and he's able
to carry the emotional weight Bond must shoulder. (There may
be no sadder moment in all of the 007 films than this movie's
shot of Bond eating alone in an elegant dining room after his
companion has been called away.) Craig looks at ease in the famous
tux, and he looks at ease chasing a car on foot, his heavy arms
swinging (though he does this maybe one or two times too many).
If there are future Bond films that focus more on escapist fun,
Craig has the physique and the attitude. But this only feels
like a Bond film in fits and starts.
The cartoonishness is gone
-- there's no supervillain this time, just some guy trying to
win a bunch of money at poker so he can finance terrorism. There
are no superweapons, no Q with the fancy gadgets (well, John
Cleese as "R" had replaced Q; hopefully we'll see him
again). This is a realistic spy caper, presumably going
back to the Ian Fleming books. And there's some suave entertainment
to be had from watching Bond stare down the bad guy across the
poker table. But perhaps the Bond movies had their day, and that
day was the '60s and '70s, when Connery and Roger Moore didn't
dream of taking the movies seriously. (It probably doesn't help
that the Austin Powers series
taught a generation to laugh at Bond, not with
him.) When you strip the 007 films down for action and "realism,"
you lose the soul of those old beloved Bond movies -- they might
as well be Jason Bourne movies.
Well, the Bourne movies already
grabbed Franka Potente, who would've made a great funky Bond
girl, and the first xXx used Asia Argento (ditto). So
what we're left with, apparently, is the rather wishy-washy Eva
Green as an accountant who hangs around to make sure Bond
doesn't blow all of MI6's money at the poker table. Bond falls
in love with her because she's the one person he can't figure
out. Well, he's young, he'll learn. Eva Green looks good in smoky
black eyeshadow, but she's a slip of a girl -- how does she go
to bed with Bond and not break? -- and vastly unmemorable even
as eye candy. As in the past few Bond films, Judi Dench's M remains
the one woman supremely unimpressed by Bond and therefore the
movies' true heroine.
One sequence near the beginning,
with the amazing Sebastien Foucan leading Bond on a merry chase
across various cranes, delivers the old-style thrills. The rest
of it is brutal punching and shooting, with a genital-torture
scene tossed in for variety. We get it: Being a double-oh agent
is rough work. But if that's all the 007 franchise has left to
tell us, maybe it needs a reboot less than a Viking funeral.
Casino Royale may bring Bond back, but it leaves behind
a lot of what made Bond Bond -- the bigness, the outrageousness,
the fun. And without those things, there's really no point
to this franchise.
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