This is not the Bond I knew all my life long...

Rating: 2/10 (3 September 2008)

It is bad, really bad. We lost the elegant flavor... The new, so called Bond is not "the classic Bond" anymore. Dialog is unsophisticated, situations are mundane and accompanied by a display of excessive mindless violence and brutality. The story line recalls places and situations which we saw so many times in previous Bond installments, but without ever managing to restore their magic and uniqueness. The former elegant, eloquent, flamboyant, and yet completely unreal spy and super agent is now an ordinary martial art thug with plain language. What a transformation.
Going to a Bond movie was like returning to a special dinner. We would like to find everything in its right place. Identical ...but different. And of course we expect to find all ingredients present and of impeccable quality. The villains are expected to be highly educated, eloquent and flamboyant as well. Our villain here in Casino Royale invested money from an Ugandan warlord in puts, and needed to blow up an aircraft to make his investment win big. Really? And once it failed, a poker game was the "big plan" to get it all back. Yes, a poker game. This was it, this is the entire plot, the level of "sophistication" of a devious plan. Do you think that this is worth a Bond movie? I want my Spectre back. I want to see the game for the domination of the world, with unreal but physically plausible equipment, which none of the gullible governments has. And I want Bond saving us all, as always, but of course differently each time.
Shame on you, Casino. Sean Connery and Roger Moore are still the quintessential Bonds for me. With films starring Timothy Dalton, the entire enterprise began to spiral down, and sadly it has never recovered.