Fails to escape from the clichés

Rating: Null/10 (11 December 2006)

The films starts fairly well with a comparatively (for Bond) brutal fight scene and assassination, told in grainy faux black and white. For a short while it feels as if Bond has been revitalised, as if we are seeing a new side to an old and tired character. No gadgets, no Q and no Moneypenny is a good thing and served to reinforce this impression. Sadly the film fails to deliver on its early promise.
We are soon introduced to the villain of the piece, a nasty banker called le Chiffre ("the Number", for those who wondered) and it is here that I started getting the feeling that the film was beginning to loose it. Mads Mikkelsen does a good job of portraying le Chiffre. He doesn't rant and rave and avoids the over the top attitude that has characterised so many a Bond villain. He does, however, sport a scar across his left eye and a tendency to weep blood at crucial moments. If Casino Royale is supposed to be an updating of the old, camp, Bond ethos - why, oh why did we have to have a facially scarred villain - the old pantomime is there, even if Mikkelsen does his best to avoid it in his acting.
Daniel Craig (Bond) is good. He eschews the silky smoothness of Brosnan and the Valium calm of Moore, combining something of Dalton's self-loathing with Connery's laconic sociopathy. The result is good. He portrays a Bond you can just about believe in. I cannot speak as to whether he can "smolder" successfully on-screen, to me he looked as if he was slightly constipated - but maybe the girls in the audience were lapping it up.
Eva Green (Vesper Lynd) seemed to have got the best part in the film, and played it very well. She was icy and vulnerable - both convincingly and reminded me, in a way, of a young Lauren Bacall. I was surprised and impressed that the film-makers managed to avoid the obvious vespa/bicycle/riding gag implicit in her name.
*spoiler*
The is very little subtlety to the by-the-numbers story and the film feels padded to meet the length requirements. I felt at least 20 minutes could happily have been cut. The story involves a banker plotting to blow up a plane to drive down airline stock prices, raising the value of derivatives contracts he has bought with his terrorist client's money, and then having to enter a poker contest to make up his losses when this plot is foiled by Bond. Some effort was taken to make the poker game suspenseful but it felt flat and lifeless. Bond ends up winning everything with a straight flush off the river card (as I recall). Given that Bond spends a lot of time spouting off that poker is a game of skill and reading your opponent the fact that he wins on a 1 in 26 fluke chance seems a little foolish. Bond gets tortured in a scene that doesn't seem to have the courage of its convictions, and comes complete with an enormous deus ex machina. The remainder is visible a mile off and hardly feels worth the wait.
*/spoiler*
The script was fairly good (at least by the standards of a Bond film) with some good quipping between Craig and Green. It could have used some more continuity checking however. There is a moment when Bond orders the worlds most complicated cocktail from a barman, off the top of his head, much impressing the people around him. Five minutes later he is in a public bar ordering the trademark vodka martini "Shaken or stirred?" asks the waiter "Do I look like I care." responds Bond. I don't mind whether Bond cares if his martinis are shaken or stirred but it strikes me that someone who can order a 10 ingredient cocktail off the top of his head probably would. Thus the later line about not caring about whether the cocktail is shaken or stirred seems incongruous and crowbared in to make the audience laugh. This is just one in a fairly long list of slight errors that grate if you cannot get caught up in the film.
All in all this felt like a triumph of mediocrity. It isn't bad, but it isn't that good either. By comparison with the last two Brosnan films (which seemed to have been directed by an MTV obsessed teenager with ADD) it was fantastic - but being fantastic by comparison does not make it a great film. I would advise people to see it, after all I seem to be in a minority in disliking it, but frankly I'd wait to rent it as it didn't have anything to make me feel that my cinema cash was well spent.
In the end if you want to see a good low-key European spy thriller watch a Bourne film. Casino Royale wants to have it's cake and eat it. It wants to have the raw energy of Bourne with the glamour of Mission Impossible and in the end fails to best either.
Casino Royale is likely to be enjoyed by everyone except:
1) the hard core "Camp" Bond fans, who think that a James Bond without a safari suit and a watch that is a laser cutter, car remote control, bomb detonator and cold food storage device is not worthy of the name; and,
2) those (like me) who think that Ronin and the Bourne films (along with classics like The Ipcress File) are the height of the spy thriller genre.