Exciting and well made... but not really a Bond film

Rating: 7/10 (18 November 2006)

So Bond is back. Except this is Bond Year Zero. Bond Rebooted. Bond: The Beginning.
In this loose adaptation of Ian Fleming's 1953 novel - the first to feature James Bond - Daniel Craig stars as 007 just as he has gained 'Double-0' status by chalking up two kills (and we see the kills in oddly film noir style black-and-white). After a debut mission in Madagascar goes awry, Bond is assigned to play a high stakes poker game with terrorist financier Le Chiffre, knowing that winning the game will bankrupt Le Chiffre, and losing it will mean Her Majesty's government directly funding terrorism...
The bloody and breathless chase in Madagascar immediately informs us that this is not Bond as we've known him before, but a raw and uncompromising version. Craig doesn't even look remotely like any other Bond, with his dirty blonde hair, rugged features, and rippling, hairless muscles (which the film-makers' deem it necessary to show off at every opportunity). Emotionally he is completely different too. This Bond is not indestructible and cool under pressure, but volatile and vulnerable, even falling rather quickly in love with Eva Green's Vesper Lynd, who is sent to the Casino Royale with Bond to keep an eye on the money he is gambling.
The action is relentlessly exciting, with several brutal fist-fights, a truly spectacular car crash, and eventually a collapsing Venetian house. The performances are also universally very good. Judi Dench is rather incongruously brought back to play the morose M, Eva Green is an enigmatic Bond girl, and Mads Mikkelson does as much as he can with a thin role as Le Chiffre. As for Craig, he can definitely play the back-to-basics, street-fighting man this Bond is apparently supposed to be - certainly at least as well as you would have expected any other actor to have played him.
The trouble is that this film never really looks or feels like a Bond film. There is no Moneypenny, no Q, and there are no gadgets. The theme tune is entirely forgettable, and John Barry's famous Bond music is shunned until the final credits. Le Chiffre, an asthmatic banker, makes for a rather pathetic super-villain, and there are no colourful henchman for Bond to duel. Bond himself is dismissed by M as just a "thug" early in the film, and he proves her right throughout, with little charm or wit to complement his undoubted talent for beating people up without the slightest concern for civilians and innocent parties who get in the way. He doesn't even "give a damn" if his vodka martini is shaken or stirred.
In fact the film appears more closely modelled on the Jason Bourne franchise than previous Bond films. Whilst I appreciate the need to renew and reinvent 007, I question the need to rob from Bond almost every single ingredient that made him such a success in the first place. If we want a series of films about an MI6 hooligan that's fine, but why not create a new character altogether? Interestingly 007 does by the close of the film utter the famous words, "The name's Bond. James Bond." Perhaps this is to signify that this film is just an introduction to the all-new Bond, and that the panache will re-appear in future films.
In the meantime CASINO ROYALE makes for a thrilling preamble. But be warned that it doesn't have much more in common with the official 20 Bond movies that preceded it than the farcical 1967 adaptation with Peter Sellers and Woody Allen.