Bond Is Back With A Whole New Bang

Rating: 8/10 (19 November 2006)

On the announcement of Daniel Craig on a rainy October day in 2005 i found myself thinking that Bond had surely just been flushed down the pan.
Yet once the film began to roll in the theater today i sat there in amazement at how wrong the critics can be including myself. The stunning opening to the film in black and white will totally take you by surprise, with no gun barrel right after the company logos to assure us this is Bond you might believe you've walked into the wrong film, perhaps maybe a new Jason Bourne film but if you think that you'd be wrong. Oh by the way the gun barrel does appear and when it does you'll either love it or hate it.
Then the main titles kick in with a super sounding Bond song by Chris Cornell which really hits home that this is a new Bond for a new generation and it makes no reservations about people in the audience taking this with them. The main titles themselves are stunning, not using the conventional topless women shaking their bodies in the shadows, but using a different configuration than us Bond fans are used to.
So here we go we're into the film and we open in Madagascar where we get a fantastic and stunning sequence to which Bond chases a bomber round a construction yard, not just a round it but in it and on top of it and running and jumping about on cranes. I must say that this is a great sequence and don't be surprised if you can't take your eyes from the screen because it really is that good.
So far so good but what about the new Bond i hear you cry, well this is certainly a Bond much more close to the novels and short stories that Fleming wrote and i certainly would say that Daniel Craig makes Bond a hard character again to compare him to any of the other Bonds you'd really have to put him next to Timothy Dalton who to this day i still believe gave such a great performance as Bond.
A villain is so important and in this film he is extremely important as he is very central to the plot, but this isn't a villain out for world domination, this is a guy who's in trouble, you see he has lost a lot of money not belonging to him and needs to get it back and so sets up a poker game at Casino Royale. Mads Mikkelsen plays this villain with a certain quality you've never seen a villain with before, they even gave the guy asthma a villain with asthma? Crazy you might say but this is a villain that feels real eve with the eye that cries blood. I loved watching the character but i don't think he gets the total amount of screen time he deserves.
Eva Green plays the Bond girl but not the one your used to. Here is a Bond girl with a little bit more sparkle a little more of everything than really any of the other Bond girls have ever had, she plays the character with much more depth and plays it to the maximum and gives a strong performance So on the whole this film is excellent and if not one of the great.
Bonds and with this as a template i think further Bond films can be exciting and as big a spectacle as ever without the use of the typical Hollywood CGI and this is why in this reviewers opinion that Bond has lasted so long and done so well with every film so no more CGI just a good story and a good old piece of action! Speaking of story this is one of the best Bond scripts thats probably going to get a shot for the screen. Paul Haggis of "Crash" fame brings his talented writing skills to those of ever fading Bond writer Neal Purvis and Robert Wade who wrote 2002's Die Another Day which is probably one of the worst Bond films to date. Here Haggis makes sure that this Bond film does not fall to the same fate offering snappy lines and the often quip we expect from Bond.
Now on many peoples minds who have read the book or know of the famous torture scene then you will not be disappointed with it in this film. Daniel Craig plays the scene with so much force and even manages to give a little joke at the same time. Mad Mikkelesen is also brilliant in this scene as the desperate man doing whatever it takes to get what he wants, in this case money. It is just the stand out scene of the film!
So what are the bad points of this film if any? Well the real problem which sounds really silly because its the main theme of the film but there are just too many minutes of film dedicated to the poker being played. As said this does sound like a really stupid complaint with the film but when watching the film or after viewing you may feel the same way.
Now with Bond himself, i really have always thought that Daniel Craig was a poor choice for Bond and there were better candidates but i'm not going to just say Craig is a poor choice by going on a rant about how his hair is blonde and he has stand out blue eyes because those are just silly little things that many people are going to pick at so if you read that as a complaint to why Craig isn't Bond scrap the review straight away.
This is a Bond film on the tops of its gameRoll on Bond 22!
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