At last. A successor to Connery.

Rating: 10/10 (18 November 2006)

So much so that we can even see the cracks in Sean Connery's wonderful early performances. Cracks in Connery's performances? Well yes. But nothing to detract from Connery himself. Craig's power is as strong as Sean's, but of a more real 21st century school. We suddenly see the rat-a-tat Connery delivery as being from the pre-De Niro realism era of the 50's. Daniel Craig offers us a very much now version of a dark and real Bond, every bit as willing as Connery and Lazenby to punch with along arm; to make an ordinary bit of humour into a belly laugh; and to menace with a steely stare rather than a Walther PPK. The story is a ripper too. Taking what to many is the best of the Bond books and leaving well enough alone, the writers have produced a gripping story that is the best in the film catalog. The writers sensibly only adjusted the early 1950s Cold War setting into something that concerns the world more in the post-9/11 era (and there is a date of 2006 mentioned in the film. Something I can't remember from one of the 20 predecessors). It might be only black and white for the pre-title sequence, but it could well have stayed that way, for this is as film noir as the Third Man or 39 Steps. Tim Dalton added menace and truth to his performances as Bond. This time the producers have done their bit too. They have enveloped another capable central actor with a film worthy of him. Peter Lamont's designs are quite probably the best of his 40 decades with the franchise: real and functional and so evocative as to place you in the middle of the action. To show how much of a mistake it would have been to return to the excesses of the past films, I found myself worried when the quartermaster turns up ("Q" to you and me), but it wasn't John Cleese, but an ordinary man, an archetype technical who might well have stepped straight out of a lab somewhere. There was no room for deconstructionist flippacy in this Bond film, and the film is all the better for it. If Die Another Day grossed almost half a billion dollars, then on artistic and visionary counts alone, this one should be the biggest film of the year.