An Awesome 21st Bond Film

Rating: 9/10 (21 November 2006)

From the start, Casino Royale puts itself in a league of its own.
The movie's opening scene, arguably the best of any Bond film's, makes it quite clear that Bond-rookie Daniel Craig is not Pierce Brosnan.
Like On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), in which newcomer George Lazenby replaced Sean Connery as 007, Casino Royale marks with a new actor to play the charming and charismatic spy the beginning of a new era of Bond films.
First-time viewers of Bond will undoubtedly enjoy the secret agent's 21st exciting escapade, while aficionados of the series have plenty to look forward to.
Although some Bond fans may have been initially disappointed in the film for its lack of the customary gun-barrel sequence that opened the first seconds of the previous 20 movies, most were pleasantly surprised when the sequence appeared later as a lead-in to the main titles.
Unlike any Bond film since The Living Daylights (1987), Casino Royale sticks mostly to the plot of an Ian Fleming book. As a result, James Bond is back to his roots in Casino Royale as the determined, bare-knuckled, cold-hearted killer Fleming had, in his 1953 novel of the same title, intended his secret agent character to be.
While several elements from the book were changed in order to better fit the current time period (cell-phones and high-stakes Texas Hold'Em replaced Fleming's Cold War trappings and Chemin de Fer), the focus of the film was much more on its richly nuanced characters than on high-tech gizmos and gadgets.
In fact, everything in the film is more realistic. The exotic locales, fast cars, and stunning Bond girlsas well as several other hallmarks of the series, such as the famous phrase "BondJames Bond"are all still included, only without the campy, cartoon-like tone that characterized the earlier films.
Hand-to-hand combat is much more frequent and James Bond appears to be more human than superhero.
The action sequences are much more convincing and rather than the cheap puns evident in past films, Casino Royale's one-liners are actually clever and legitimate jokes.
The surrounding cast has been tweaked as well. Instead of a megalomaniac out to rule the world, the villain Le Chiffre (French for "the Cipher"), played by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, is a banker to international terrorists whose only interest is money.
The heroine, Vesper Lynd, played by beautiful French actress Eva Green, serves as Bond's female equivalentsuave, shrewd, skeptical and sex-savvy. Rather than worn-out double entendres of sexual innuendo, their multilevel exchanges are convincingly sharp.
Jeffrey Wright does an excellent job as Bond's CIA ally Felix Leiter, while Italian actors Giancarlo Giannini and Caterina Murino also deliver laudable performances.
And, as always, Dame Judi Dench is perfect for the role of 'M,' Bond's boss and head of Britain's secret service, MI6.
Casino Royale's outstanding cinematography and direction juxtapose its highly memorable storyline. The action sequences are brilliantly shot and edited, appropriately placing emphasis on real-life stunts in preference to special effects, and the plot is simply more engaging than that of most Bond films.
Additionally, the title theme song "You Know My Name," sung by Chris Cornell, former front-man of Seattle rock-band Soundgarden, is an excellent piece of music and perfectly characterizes the plot and tone of the movie.
Director Martin Campbell, who also made the 17th Bond film, GoldenEye (1995), should certainly be praised for his remarkable work and despite a few slow but completely necessary parts, Casino Royale could not have been much better as the latest volume of what seems to be the never-ending series of Bond films.