Bond Road Takes a Detour

Rating: 9/10 (24 May 2007)

From what I've read in these comments, Casino Royal is the utter most controversial Bond flick to have ever graced our televisions. Not only has the actor been replaced, but the entire franchise has taken a different road to what looks to be unlike anything we've seen yet.
Casino Royal reminisces back to when James Bond received his 00-status and license to kill. His first mission takes him to Montenegro where he must compete in a high-stakes poker game held by Le Chiffre, an underground banker who must win the money in order to pay back the terrorists he borrowed from. For a prequel like Casino Royal, this plot works, and rids away from all the technical story lines movies like Die Another Day has brought us. In this movie, James Bond takes up his first challenge, meets a rather interesting woman who challenges his dexterity and gets involved in a mixed bag of controversial events that ultimately leads him to his main goal: stop Le Chiffre.
What makes Casino Royal so much different from it's predecessors, is how the the movie is formulated. Daniel Craig takes the role as the sixth Bond to have helmed in a Bond flick, which I must praise because Pierce Brosnan was getting kinda trippy with his appeal to the franchise. In other news, the movie strips away characters such as Q and Money Penny, the gadgets, the freakishly armed vehicle and overly done action sequences. But the question is: Does this work? I say yes.
The one thing that us viewers focus on is the Bond Formula. You know the drill: sexy scampy women, high tech weaponry and gadgets, armed vehicle, pretty much the bipolar opposite of the description I gave up above. We basically abandoned Mission Impossible to take up The Bourne Identity. But didn't Mission Impossible change it's ways when reaching the third film? Of course. From what I remember, I don't even suppose there was a Bond Formula to begin with. All the movies had women involved, the majority of them end up having a serious sex fetish with Bond. Some of the movies barely had any use of gadgets (You Only Live Twice, Goldeneye-exploding pen, lasso belt). Even if they were in use, they were barely emphasized on, just having their little cameo which people have little to no knowledge of remembering. Another complaint is the action. People, I can't even note one Bond film which featured a crazed shootout with guns blazing and whatnot (except for Tomorrow Never Dies). No Bond film ever seriously emphasized that. The franchise was like Indiana Jones, they don't stick to a certain action formula to keep the motion going. Casino Royal still had chase sequences, a fight scene and a semi-shootout. The only difference was that it wasn't stylized as the other movies.
Then it all boils down to two factors: Bond's character and story mood. While he still has his women charms, he takes it differently with Vesper. People keep critizising him staring off into the mirror in a dramatized state, and noting that he is suppose to be a killer, why is he feeling up like that? People have misintepreted that scene terribly, it makes me laugh. For one thing: He was tripping over a couple flights of stairs to avoid a crazy man with a machete. Two, he already knows Vesper is fragile to violence, in which she is involved in the bloodshed. Three, he only does that once. You don't see him mourn every time he killed someone. Which is why he laughed at the man who exploded at the airport. Bond was standing in the bathroom, tired, huffing and puffing, staring into the mirror with that *what the hell happened...geez* look on his face, unaware of how Vesper is taking the situation. A little more realistic than most films.
To take off my irrelevant tangant, I will note that this was definitely a wake up call to the Bond franchise. It's a definite watch, the story was great, the characters were portrayed well, everything went smoothly. Action was a tad scarce, but I'm not going to complain at a high rate.