DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY - the worst Bond movie ever made

Rating: 1/10 (26 November 2006)

I should have known how bad it was going to be by the opening credits. Normally they are a sight for sore eyes - fabulous music made by top artists (Madonna, Duran Duran, etc.) - gorgeous writhing women and erotic, interesting sequences - and this just the opening credits. None of that in this James Bond - the worst opening credits ever - images of cards (hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs) everywhere and that was it - not to mention the lousy music - but that was the tip of the iceberg. James Bond normally means amazing gadgets (cars that can disappear with invisibility shields, cars that turn into planes or submarines, wristwatches that double as satellite transmitters or tracking devices or detonators, pens that are miniature explosives, or containing poisoning gas etc. In Casino Royale, the most exciting gadget was a portable defibrillator - there were NO other gadgets in the ENTIRE movie (OK, there were cellphones and laptops, but nothing else.) Forget that the story itself was overly contrived and ridiculously hard to follow, the movie was two and a half hours long with one entire hour dedicated to them sitting in the Salon Prive of a casino playing high stakes poker, staring at each other and raising the stakes. Who wants to see that in a James Bond movie!!!? For goodness sake,we expect our James Bond to perform impossible stunts, to attract and seduce beautiful woman after beautiful woman - THAT'S the James Bond we all know - suave, debonair, sophisticated, a man of mystery, intriguing, with a presence - able to deliver one-liners that pack a punch, reducing the audience to chuckles - clever, witty repartee. There wasn't ONE single "James BOnd" type scene in the entire movie. It wasn't even a good action flick! It was so long and so boring! The only scene worth watching was towards the beginning when James is running after a man in Madagascar - what an athlete this man is (not James, the man on the run) - doing "free running" - running up walls, leaping over objects, shimmying up cranes - TRULY the star of the entire movie and the only thing worth seeing. The rest of the movie was dismal, pathetic, boring, and stupid. They never explained what "Ellipsis" meant - yet that apparently was the word seen on all cellphones.
Ava Green acted like a wooden block,
There was absolutely no chemistry between them and frankly, zero charisma. James Bond plots are supposed to be impossible - with "baddies" trying to take over the world but foiled by 007 - keeping us on the edge and filling the screen with action - this plot was just silly, contrived, long, non-sensical, overly complicated and completely non-James Bond.
Even compared to a Mission Impossible type of film, it was appalling - What about the unnecessary but brutal torture scene? That's not the kind of movie I'd want my family to see and yet James Bond is supposed to be a family film - for everyone to see - it really was unnecessary and ugly and what was the point behind it? Nope - not the James Bond we know and love and my advice is, give it a miss.