Bond is reinvented by the man who did the very same thing 11 years previously in a touching and engaging thriller.

Rating: 7/10 (4 November 2008)

In 1995, New Zealand born director Martin Campbell made Goldeneye, the 17th entry into the James Bond franchise. Campbell managed to update and bring a new lease of life to a series many thought would peter out following the end of The Cold War between global superpowers. Not only did Campbell update Bond from a globe trotting, hunting down of drug smuggling and cartel dealing drug barons but he poked fun at the Bond character, having characters rendering him a 'relic' from The Cold War and others laughing at the quips that has made him famous off screen; quips such as 'shaken but not stirred' given a shake down of its own: 'shaken, but not undisturbed' laughed uneasy Russian ally Valentin Zukovsky.
The film marked Pierce Brosnan's debut and is one of my few favourites in a franchise a lot of us like purely because we might have grown up watching them but viewing them now they do come across as rather ordinary means of entertainment. Indeed, how many times do we mention James Bond when really talking about the greats or indeed the minor greats of cinema? Fast-forward the series eleven years and we have Casino Royale; new Bond and new universe in which to play about with. Re-enter Martin Campbell and another good entry to the series. Once again, Campbell updates Bond but this time into a new universe as a new world order (war on global terrorism) looms in the background. Campbell rescues Bond once again, ripping him away from phoney windsurfing CGI effects and visual 'nods' to Bond films past alá Die Another Day just as he did in 1995 when Bond was last seen chasing drug barons on a revenge mission, and gives him room to actually be someone.
I can remember seeing Casino Royale in the cinema, two years after I saw 2004's Layer Cake which starred Bond-to-be Daniel Craig. I can remember that shot in which he is given a silenced pistol at a friend's house and how he mockingly creeps down a corridor in his friend's house alá James Bond. His friend reacts with a whispered expletive and the audience chuckled  the star may well have been born right there.
Casino Royale begins in black and white, a tactic used to get across that feeling of the retro or time gone by, as Bond (Craig) nears his second hit, a man on the take named Dryden (Sinclair). This use of black and white knocks us slightly, perhaps intended to pre-date 1962's Dr. No, this being a prequel of sorts and indeed, I cannot remember the use of black and white in too many other Bond films for the reasons to create a presence of history. I think Daniel Craig nails Bond in a certain sense through the face and facial expressions. Connery's Bond was a young and raw Bond, very much akin to Craig's here; Moore's smarmy and overly confident approach was perhaps suited to a man nearing the end of his 007 career where as Dalton's and Brosnan's seemed to get across a decent mixture of aggression and compassion, even if some of their respective films were a little ordinary.
Craig plays Bond in the same raw style Connery did in the 1960s  Bond is new on the beat; he seems to enjoy the killing and the action. Indeed, that deliberately long tracking shot in on Craig's face as he watches a terrorist detonate his own bomb whilst it's attached to his belt evokes a joy that he not only saved the day but outsmarted his enemy in the process. Early on in the film, Bond's immaturity or eagerness pushes through in an impressively told manner  he isn't given a stone wall assignment by M (Dench) but acts on impulse, scooting around Madagascar and the Bahamas in search of whoever. What's interesting here and makes a further mockery of the laughably bad Bourne series is that in essence, these are chase sequences or ideas revolving around chase but they are shot, structured and edited in a fashion that is coherent and enjoyable. I'd rather watch the Miami airport chase ten times than sit through The Bourne Ultimatum again in its entirety.
So Bond is the renegade, the anti-hero. But what follows and after a lot of talk of egos and so forth is a humbling; a rendez-vous with a female foil named Vesper Lynd who he will come to love. As a female character compared to the wife of a possible enemy earlier on, she isn't as glamorous; loose or seductive and the conversation she has with Bond about certain masculine traits including dress sense pushes her away from a typically loose or classical 'Bond girl', a cliché or something we've all come to easily identify. She is superior to Bond's previous squeeze in the film and acts as a foil more so than a piece of eye candy or a tool to assist Bond. There is a scene in which she is in the shower but it is a humane scene as she contemplates having seen death and dead bodies prior in the day for the first time. The typical characters in a 'Bond movie' are stripped down and presented as human, she isn't topless in the shower as Bond joins her, she is broken. Casino Royale is an enjoyable and well constructed espionage thriller that twists and turns throughout but remains a heartfelt and very engaging film.