Someone needs to bring Campbell and Baird back to the franchise.

Rating: 9/10 (7 February 2020)

I could nitpick this film, but its such a triumph of a reboot in every regard, and such a pleasurable quintessential action movie with every dept on all cylinders that not enjoying every aspect of this movie is an exercise in futility.
Watching with a raucous, amped crowd after Secret Cinema, cheering and whooping at Bond's successes, tortures, and emergences from water in his trunks, Casino rarely shows its age even though it's 13 years old. It's still an invigorated, relevant, creative and sure-footed franchise at this point; every frame and every scene has a myriad of little details that flesh out the world, and make the film feel grounded even though it hits the franchise-high notes of spy-fantasy.
A brazen, brutish, excessive Bond film reboot that I have almost nothing more to say about than has already been written.
The decision to use previous reboot director Martin Campbell is welcome and clever and the holdover of Judi Dench as M is as obvious as it is surprising.
Art house flourishes; the snapshot in the cut of the section chief's family photo as he's shot, a creatively integrated gun barrel sequence, the Bond-to-CCTC camera cut, and more, elevate the material and prove it as something different.
Mads Mikelson is such a menacing and out-there newcomer at the time that it's hard to remember that he's just a banker and not a maniacal evil villain which is a strength. And with Mr. White, the film manages to build a franchise without ever looking like it's trying to.
The film is bloated and the running time and sheer variety in it makes it a film not just easily put on, but as a flagship evening film with buddies, it has all the whizbang action and badassery and all the clever stings of dialogue you can smirk about.
But overall it ticks basically every box and is still, almost ten years later, a hallmark of the action summer blockbuster genre. The sumptuous music, the sharp editing, the electric photography, the enrapturing and devilish Eva Green, and the hard, dead eyes of Craig's broken Assassin make it a film to remember and to heartily recommend.
Bonus opening credits review: Aptly taking Bond into the videogame age and using the mocap to spice up the notion of watching a film that will revolve around a card game is clever. The lack of exploited women enforces the masculinity of this iteration and makes it feel a little sports gamey. The cheesy music is the right kind of cheesy as opposed to the cringey "00" bullet holes and 'status approved' cheesiness that is eventually saved by that ice cold walk into the light and steely blue eyed look as a focal point of Craig's Bond.