Neither shaken nor stirred

Rating: Null/10 (14 September 2010)

"The film returns to "realism" and a more credible plot, with less fantasy and gratuitous humour." – The Guardian (on "The Living Daylights" – the first Bond movie to star Timothy Dalton)
Whenever the Bond franchise is reset and a new actor is brought in, the Bond publicity machine claims that this new entry will "go in new directions", "be different", "edgier", "more violent", "more realistic" etc. And every time audiences are conned, if only for a couple "new" installments, until they realise that these films don't actually change, they just absorb whatever film-making trends are currently in vogue.
Bond was always a disposable product. With no character history and a personality distilled to a series of tics, he epitomises cinema as throwaway commodity. The most commercially successful movie hero and franchise in history, the Bond films are not only rife with "product placements", but they themselves function as a kind of highly sophisticated advertisement for the James Bond brand. They must simultaneously invoke tradition and the promise of something new, yet as that newness is always bound to tradition, you never actually get anything new, just variations of the same old thing, the franchise continually destroying its past even as it persistently resurrects it. Bond is about bondage in more ways than one.
Bond was always about unrealistic fantasies of Western power, the films (including "Casino Royale") all depicting beautiful people behaving violently in a cold and "rational" fashion whilst extravagantly consuming the best materials society can provide in the form of expensive yachts, cars, food and hotels. Little thought is ever given to emotional connection, spirituality or non-dominating forms of conflict resolution, the dominant social paradigm is always vindicated and reasserted, Bond always wins (often through highly unethical means), all the women he seeks are conquered, the "traitorous woman" is always killed and a Victorian mentality of society being strictly hierarchical, mechanistic and controlled from the top by an inherited nobility, is always served up.
And of course the narrative structures of all the Bond movies are the same: we have the titillative pre-story action sequence, the revelation of the mission, the journey to the exotic location, the meeting with the first woman, the introduction of the sub villain, the mid point action sequences, the introduction of the second woman, the capture of Bond by the central villain, the escape of Bond and the climactic action sequence, often in which the bad guy is killed. Added to this mix is the usual sprinkling of black tie functions, high stakes gambles, card games, exotic locations, gun-play, dangerous car chases etc.
And as most "action movies" are reliant on the technology and conventions of the time in which they were made, and as the "pace" of these films is constantly increasing, most Bond films have a shelf life of about 3 years, each film looking dated by the time the other arrives.
Of course most action movies adhere to this formula (the Indiana Jones flicks follow it to a tee) - this is because our cultural narrative structure is shaped strongly around the pattern of the male sexual experience (setup, building tension, climax, then resolution) - but the Bond movies have been religiously following their own template and replicating whole sequences for almost six decades. This is why EON Productions, the company which produces the Bond movies, typically hires hack directors and doesn't let auteurs go near the series: no one is allowed to fiddle with the Bond ingredients. No one. ("Quantum of Solace" and "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" are, thus far, the closest the series has come to an auteur; unsurprisingly, the masses hated both)
Midway in this film a character asks Bond if he'd like his drink "Shaken or stirred?" Bond replies "Do I look like I give a damn?" as though he's suddenly treading brave new narrative terrain. In reality, such little "self-aware gimmicks" (which are scattered throughout "Casino Royale") are no more "edgy" than George Lazenby breaking the third wall and saying "this never happened to the other fellow". Once you realise these movies have never been shaken, there becomes nothing in them to really cause a stir.
6/10 – A clichéd film with an overlong final act and an underused Eva Green. The film has several action sequences, all derivative. The "free running" sequences are low rent versions of "Ong Bak" and "District 13", Bond's bathroom brawl recalls "True Lies", the airport chase seems like a deleted scene from the original "Die Hard" trilogy, whilst the "African Base standoff" at the start of the film is identical to the "Russian Base standoff" at the start of "Goldeneye" (same director, too). Incidentally, the director of this film, Martin Campbell, "rebooted" Bond in the early 90s with "Goldeneye", just as director Guy Hamilton twice "rebooted" Bond in the 60s and 70s.
Worth one viewing.