Daniel Craig can be a good tough action character, but as James Bond, he's no Sean Connery

Rating: 5/10 (2 December 2006)

The highly capable actor, Daniel Craig, certainly shows here that he's got the chops to be a brute of an action character. He belongs in a French noir gangster flick. He's wasted, or, perhaps more accurately, miscast in this bloated, overheated remake of the original James Bond movie. The 1967 version of Casino Royale starred David Niven: too urbane and fragile. Craig is raw and rough edged: he can take anything and dish it out as well, but suffers from lack of suavity. Sean Connery effected a proper balance between acting the thug and the worldly aesthete.
I grew weary after 90 minutes watching this film. It isn't so much a bore as an insult to the intelligent viewer. It offers scenes in two modes: (1) mile-a-second action, with over the top, not to be believed, inchoate chases set to wild orchestral paroxysms with added loud percussive thumps. It plays like an action comic strip. When this mode is inoperative, we instead get static close encounters between characters that are burdened by banal, dull dialogue.
Sean Connery was never banal. He had a knack for injecting a flicker of humor or sexual arousal at just the right moments. The problem here is perhaps in part bad writing and in part Daniel Craig's take, playing Bond for the heavy. With Mads Mikkelson and Isaach De Bankolé as bad guys, Dame Judi Dench as M, Giancarlo Giannini as M16's man in Montenegro, Jeffery Wright as Bond's CIA counterpart, Felix Leiter, and Caterina Murino, Eva Green and Ivana Milicevic as glam interests. My grades: 5.5/10, C+ (Seen on 12/01/06).