The Best Bond Movie.

Rating: 8/10 (5 January 2007)

Chomp, chomp, (choke), gulp. That's the sound of a good many 007-watchers, myself included, who spent the last two years or so moaning about Daniel Craig's casting as "the first blond Bond' eating our words. While I'm still rooting for Clive Owen to take his turn in a few years once the Craig/ Broccoli connection inevitably dries up, I've seldom been so happy to be wrong: Craig gives Bond a rawness and intensity that, for all of Pierce Brosnan's undeniable charm in the role, has been missing ever since the vastly underrated Timothy Dalton strapped on the Walther PPK for two money-losing late 80s installments. Craig makes Martin Campbell's fully honorable attempt to rebuild Bond from the ground up an unqualified success; if you sat through The Sum of All Fears, the disastrous 2002 attempt to redefine Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan as a single Ben Affleck rather than a married-with-children Harrison Ford, you know what a dicey endeavor that reinventing an established character can be. Amazingly, Casino Royale, like Peter Jackson's brilliant do-over of King Kong from a year before, manages the heady task of both honoring its predecessors and correcting their mistakes: after Goldfinger in 1965, most of the Bond films--good, bad or indifferent--have been as ritualistic as Japanese kabuki theater (28 minutes into the flick? OK, time for the obligatory repartee with Moneypenney!) and have been, even at their best, relentlessly bloodless enterprises in both senses of the word. Over a quarter of a decade ago, Steven Spielberg pitched Indiana Jones to George Lucas by describing everyone's favorite fighting archaeologist as "better than Bond"; the result was three films that were "must-see movie-going" rather than the "it's-there-and-it's-the-latest-so-what-the-heck" that such mediocre, by-the-numbers efforts as The Man With the Golden Gun and Moonraker had relegated the 007 films to being. Indy was no superhero...he was vulnerable, and felt pain, and Casino Royale's genius is that its Bond is still learning, makes BIG mistakes, and actually bleeds. (And bleeds, and bleeds. Make no mistake, parents, this isn't a PG-13 film at all but a hard R. If you haven't seen the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, whose thesis is that the MPAA is far more lenient toward big studio efforts than small independent movies, this will convince you.) Eva Green is hands down THE best Bond girl of all time precisely because she's not a girl at all but a real woman... intelligent, multidimensional and able to give Bond as good as she gets, and I loved how this film, while remaining in the present day and being firmly rooted in the War on Terror rather than the Cold War, works as Bond's "origin story", explaining everything from his casual/ cruel attitude toward women (007 somehow qualifies as both the honorary president of the Playboy Club AND the He-Man Women-Haters Club) to his special fondness for Aston-Martins to even where the film series' famous "bloody iris" trademark comes from. (And the movie answers a few relevant fan questions, too. If you ever wondered whether Judi Dench's M has any kind of personal life, you'll find out...if you look closely.) Nearly everything works, including the risky Texas hold-em poker sequence that takes up a substantial part of the running time, but for many the most memorable sequence will be Bond's torture scene, which recalls memories of Goldfinger's legendary "laser bit" but turns up the intensity; if men in the earlier movie's audience crossed their legs in discomfort, they're likely to twist them like pretzels during THIS variant. Two more elements that place Casino Royale on the same rarified plateau as Goldfinger and its predecessor From Russia With Love is that all three are the only films in the entire Bond series that are viable Ten Best entries for their respective years, and all three of them, to refer to a very funny play that Casino Royale makes on one of 007's signature lines, are the Bond films virtually guaranteed to leave their audiences both shaken AND stirred.