Bond Beds Babes, Sinks Buildings!

Rating: 6/10 (6 April 2008)

This is James Bond straight, for a change. The original series, begun in the early 1960s, was a big and inexpensive hit. A lot of trend setters were reading Ian Fleming -- President Kennedy was a fan -- and Fleming's stories made mincemeat out of the Cold War. SMERSH? And the young Sean Connery was the perfect screen incarnation of Bond, a parody of handsome masculinity -- and a knowing one -- with that cartoonishly broad mouth, that tongue-in-cheek smirk, and the throw-away wisecracks the script gave him.
The series may have been the initial stimulus for the rash of increasingly silly action films that followed. The series itself seemed swallowed up by them in the 1980s but soldiered on anyway, though I can't imagine who was anxious to see them.
This one takes Bond seriously. The jokes are few. Although the formula is overly familiar, it's clear that a lot of money was spent on this attempt to breathe new life into a dead horse. (These mixed clichés do full justice to the film.) In the opening scene, Bond chases a villain through an industrial construction site in Madagascar. The pair climb innumerable staircases of latticed steel before coming mano a mano at the end of a sky-high giant crane, after which they leap from the top of one building to the top of the next one lower down, until they reach the ground and somebody pulls a gun and -- well, the blanks can be filled in at leisure. Since there is no more USSR, the heavies are now some camarilla of terrorists, not that it matters. Spectacular stunt work, by the way. In the final action sequence, James Bond sinks a building on the Grand Canal in Venice with a few well-placed pistol shots. (The building floats on pontoons.) The action is interrupted by some short scenes of intrigue, a card game with a pot of $130 million that today, given the dollar's trajectory, is worth about half that much. Bond's chief opponent in the game is Le Chiffre (Mad Mikkelsen) who has a face and expression resembling that of a freshly stuffed and painted corpse. Daniel Craig is Bond himself. He's at least not ludicrously handsome though heavily muscled. Whether he can act or not can't be determined because evidently he was told not to try. Eva Greene, on the other hand, is magnificently glamorized. She could steal my $130 million any day, though I wouldn't let her near my Swedish Kroner. A dirty shame she has to drown at the end, despite her perfidy, inasmuch as we haven't yet had a chance to see her nude. We'll have to rely on our memories of Bertolucci's "The Dreamers" for that.
Should you see it? Sure, why not? There hasn't been an expensive, colorful, exotic action movie in at least a year. There was an earlier version of "Casino Royale", in 1967, I think. It was a headlong, feckless, comic spoof. I enjoyed it more than this version.