James Bourne is Better, but Not Good Enough

Rating: 5/10 (9 November 2008)

A lot has been made of Casino Royale's new direction. Out with the nonsense, back to basics, enter James Bourne. Q is agreeably absent, and the nearest thing to Moneypenny is a control-room full of 20-something CSI wannabes. In cleaning up his act, however, Bond appears to have misplaced his licence to thrill.
That Casino Royale constitutes a 'back to basics' reincarnation (a 'reboot' of the Bond timeline, in comic-book argot) speaks volumes about how far the series had lost its way  sort of like a drunk waking up after a twenty-year bender and learning to put one foot in front of the other again. Like bourbon or vodka, pyrotechnics and body counts are kept firmly out of the repentant screenplay's reach. Nothing happens in Casino Royale that could not conceivably happen in real life, which for a Bond movie is an astonishing and dubious accolade. Simply put, action movie 'basics'  explosions, tension, effective pacing and straightforward characterisation  are not in place. The latter is a moot point, for Bond's fling with Vesper Lynd is meant to be the romantic affair to end them all, her death the wound that never heals. Yet all the script can offer is the kind of clunky, unremarkable dialogue that Bond fans will recognise from the slow bits in Goldeneye. The power of Bourne's relationship with Franka Potente is never matched; there are, in fact, far more memorable romantic interludes in earlier Bond: Her Majesty's Secret Service and the Louis Armstrong sequence, for instance.
Casino Royale is both boring and complacent enough to assume its audience will forgive its boringness through their fondness for all things Bond. Undoubtedly better than Die Another Day  but that's hardly grounds for comparison.