Greener, leaner and meaner Bond

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 2006)

We're living in a post-postmodern age: Post-totalitarian, post-911, post-Austin Powers...What to do with a franchise which had developed into an exercise of biennial money-printing and which engendered huge affection but also increasing comic irony with the movie-going public. The danger signs were there: 2003 Die Another Day took a bluf, self-parodying approach to the puns, gadgets and doomsday weapons lampooned by Mike Myers and got away with it due to slickness, spend, star turns from the likes of Halle Berry and the fading testosterone charms of Pierce Brosnan. But it felt like a last hoorah, and self parody can bring short term laughs in return for long term damage.
What they did was go back to basics. Take a new Bond back to the start of the story, strip away a large amount of the character's cartoon aspect, strip out the saggy excesses of the plots, characters and set-pieces and big up the rawer, less family-friendly aspects of international espionage.
Daniel Craig's Bond is a cruel man, with cruel eyes and he does nasty things to people on screen. This is not a character to engender familiar affection, but respect. As befits going back to the beginning of the story there is unrealised ambition, but also elements of self-doubt.
The script also allows him to make some big mistakes at several key points, some are based on judgement and experience, others plain naivety. But Bond bounces back here as he's always done, but more often using his fists and his malicious streak rather than some outrageous invention designed to get him out of trouble.
This is a Bond much more of an outsider, still inwardly socially awkward despite the developing veneer - 'there are dinner suits and dinner suits' observes Vesper Lynd sardonically, prodding that sense of residual inferiority absent from all this character's previous incarnations.
All of this is good. Much more of the iron fist than Brosnan's velvet glove, or worse, Dalton's limp civil-service handshake. It chimes in with a new sense of purpose and necessity that accompanies the concept of 'secret service' which has arisen since the growth in global terrorism. Since the return of Bond in the post-communist 1990s, the film's script had previously poked fun at Bond as being a 'relic' of the cold war, a silly establishment anachronism to be indulged. Suicide bombs, clandestine weapons programs and assassinations have turned on its head this view of spies and spying.
As terrorism is the underlying thread of threat in the film it is at once topical and believable. But in that there's a problem, at least from its appreciation on the pure level of popcorn entertainment. Bond villains have really lost their ambition - where once they planned to hold the world to ransom or even start a new Master Race in space, the height of their ambition is to fleece a few poker players in a tacky Yugoslavian resort hotel.
'If you fail, our government will have knowingly financed terrorism', chimes Vesper. Not exactly the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, and the stakes of the game are $150m. About the price of an NHS hospital, and the velodrome for the upcoming Olympics.
The set-pieces have been reigned in too. The opening free-running sequence is inventive and impressive, and the airport runway scene is fun. Unintentional satire too, given the obvious allusion to the prototype and the Airbus A380. Blowing up their new plane could lead the company to bankruptcy! Yes, and delays due to wiring problems can do the same...
After that the film distinctly loses pace which only accentuates its length. There was a palpable sense about 15 minutes from the end that the audience had had enough. It was a bold move to set such a long sequence of the film at a poker table, and it is relevant to the title, but there was just a few too many hands played. And at the end, after all the chips have been played I was expecting an underwater lair to emerge from the Adriatic, full of boiler-suited goons. But no, it was just a poker competition and, well done James, you won.
The ending gives a strong sense of linkage into a future episode, where the organisation for which Le Chiffre is working will reveal itself in more detail. Maybe there's a lair somewhere after all.