best of the bad bonds

Rating: 3/10 (8 January 2007)

Casino Royale was the best of the string of bad Bond films created in the last decade and has to be the last nail in the 007 coffin.
The story was a hodgepodge of plots from different secret agent movies strung together by a single thread of Bond ego. All the cliché elements you would expect were included: Prague, agents, double agents, high adrenalin chase, a beautiful girl, a fast car, the crash, the turn in the plot, the betrayal, the one eyed dude, hacking into databases, the chair of torture in the middle of a desolate, wet, rusted warehouse etc. However it was so clumsily done in this movie that it's hard to tell if the writing was at fault or the director.
There were at least two "aha" moments for Bond (where he puts some clues together) in the movie that made little sense to the audience. The love story was weak and can be described as trying too hard to make the "opposite attracts" element fit into the movie.
The $150m game at the centre of the movie was drawn out and immensely loose in its parallel stories which involved Bond, the girl and his nemesis.
Bond's "hard as nails yet smooth as silk" character was well preserved by actor Daniel Craig whose athleticism set him apart from Pierce Brosnan. Not having a proper Bond girl was a disappointment but the two "almost bond girls" had enough eye candy to make up for that.
No academy award winning performances and I can't see this as being very much talked about for anything else but the fact that an Aston Martin DB9 does not make it to the end of the movie in one piece but of course a car with such a low centre of gravity could not realistically crash the way it did.
I gave it 3 out of 10