Opening credits to Final Frame - You're "In" the movie

Rating: 9/10 (19 November 2006)

The opening credits for Bond movies, long famous for the writhing women and cutting-edge animation technique, gets a spiffy update to signal a new era of Bond that focuses more on the Cold War spy/man of action angle, rather than the impossibly infallible lady killer...not that he doesn't manage to allure. The chase scenes are still present, but not necessarily done in a car with a requisite fruit cart tipping over in the open air market. The action is very fast and you'll burn calories just watching this extremely physical role unfold at the speed it does.
Casino Royale is actually the first of Ian Flemmings novels and introduces the character to the world, but the original 60's movie made of it was a send-up of spy movies and a "counter" to the overwhelming success of the devil-may-care MI-6 agent previously portrayed by Sean Connery.
Since the series has outlived all the book titles and certainly its authors, it makes sense to re-start the character from the beginning. Introduce how he got his "double-oh" designation, his Astin Martin, how he developed his drinking preferences, and how his heart was forever broken. He is thus rebuilt in the form of Daniel Craig,an actor who looks neither brooding nor suave on the poster, but gets it done on screen.
The wry humor traditionally present in the films is still present but (mercifully!) the horrible puns and the incongruously over-the-top daftness of the jokes appears to have been removed. The only detraction I can make from the movie is the persistence of the product placement in the script here and there. Most egregious would be the Omega (Oh-mee-guh? Do the Brits pronounce this brand name this way?) A necessary evil, and a tolerable one in film-making of this magnitude. I paid $10.50 to see it in a Los Angeles theatre and I have every intention of seeing it again. (So many movies look so LAME these days, I usually don't bother seeing them even once...)
Technical note: the camera work is amazing. The editing of the construction site scene alone is just thrilling. How many cameras it must have taken to get some of these scenes accomplished, I cannot guess.