More Bourne than Bond?

Rating: 9/10 (9 December 2006)

Finally it's happened! After over 40 years on the big screen Bond, along with the Bond movie makers, has grown up. Until Casino Royale the Bond character was a wise-cracking, dapper, womanising Mr Nice-guy: not the sort of stuff assassins are made of. The plots were heavily reliant on special effects and gadgets to provide the viewing audience with anything above ordinary. And as for the villains, how painfully Batmanesque they were. This movie marks a brave, entertaining and exciting departure for Bond. This Bond draws a much closer fit with Ian Fleming's original. It presents a man tooled up for the job with a cold-killer's instinct rather than a quip and a 'get out of trouble' wristwatch or ball-point pen.A man who is clearly an intelligent, charming thug rather than a city gent trying hard not to perspire. A man dealing with emotional turmoil. The Bond movie makers have tried in the past to bring some depth to Bond (Die Another Day, Licence to Kill spring to mind), but they have never before moved out of the shallows to deliver a Bond with truly 3-dimensional appeal. In many ways, the Casino Royale Bond has more in common with Jason Bourne, than he does with any of the Bond predecessors. The plot stands on its own, without the need for the usual Bond props of tiresomely unbelievable car or boat chases. The villains are finally completely divorced from those megalomaniac crackpots with a plan to takeover the whole world. This Bond villain is both believable and more modest in his objectives. This was a truly excellent movie. The only downside for me was the continuity of Judi Dench in the role of M. The filmmakers could get away with it in the make-believe environment conjured up with a Brosnan Bond and stupendously ridiculous plots, but in a brave new world of Bond gritty realism Judi just has to go