Massively superficial

Rating: 3/10 (23 November 2006)

I am not a Bond fan. I have watched most of the Bond movies, and to me virtually all of them are silly and nonsensical to the point of the preposterous. Sometimes they try to put some comedy and satire in there to make the lack of realism more endurable, but this rarely works. It consistently panders too much to the lowest common denominators.
And it's not because I'm not a fan of far-out action movies - I am! I happily watch a lot of Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal and Jackie Chan movies, and I thought Mission Impossible II was a better Bond movie than any Bond movie. And hell, so was The Bourne Identity.
But this new Bond movie? You know, I thought, from the almost uniformly good reviews and the obvious change in style, that Casino Royale might be different from the other Bond movies. And it was: It was bad for a lot of different reasons. Well, and a few of the same reasons, too.
I admit it had acting. But it had absolutely no story. And it was *incredibly* dull. Most of the action was not impressive, and the love story ended up not working. It would have worked if Vesper Lynd had been in earnest league with the bad guys. But she wasn't. She was forced into it. So why does that constitute an immense betrayal that lays the foundation for Bond's "disposable" attitude to women? Nope, it doesn't make a lick of sense. And this was the only thing in the movie with any chance of making sense, since we don't know who the bad guys were and obviously aren't supposed to care. This is immensely bad writing. I left the theater with a feeling of having taken absolutely nothing worthwhile with me from it. Even as aptly-called "empty entertainment", this movie had nothing to offer me, and it left me largely indifferent.
Note that in knocking this movie I'm not knocking Daniel Craig. I always thought he'd do a good job, and he did do a decent one. But he's not charismatic enough to truly carry a movie as superficial as this, the way it badly needed to be held aloft. And as for Mads Mikkelsen, of whom, as a Dane, I am naturally a huge fan; his decent performance did little to sway me in this movie's favor. He was intense in the torture scenes, but the poker scenes were themselves dangerously close to audience torture.
And as for Eva Green - hate to say it, but she's just not my type. She doesn't do a thing for me. She's kinda pretty, sure, and she can act, sure, but she's not my idea of a good-looking woman. (She did resemble Ursula Andress - who's not my type, either - a good deal, though.) She exudes a kind of aristocratic daintiness that I just have zero interest in. Now, young Jacqueline Bisset as Ms. Goodthighs in the 1967 movie - *she* was a sizzler! Anyway - another problem I have with the new Casino Royale was the drowning scene. Was a disgustingly protracted death scene really necessary? No, and it was, in my opinion, in damn poor taste.
Sorry, but my personal experience of watching this movie was that it was almost as dull as drying paint, and had less coherence. The only thing that was remotely well done was the acting and some of the characterization, and that's not even enough for this movie to approach mediocrity. I am at a complete loss to understand why it garnered rave reviews from virtually all quarters. Did the reviewers see a different movie than I did? Must have. To see here on IMDb that half of everybody who watched this so far have rated it a 10 out of 10 is the closest I have ever come to suspecting really foul play with the ratings here. I have great difficulty believing that so many people found this movie so good. Or maybe this movie is simply seen mostly by people who have no discerning bone in their body, and can only rate movies either a 1 or a 10. Barring a conspiracy, that has to be the explanation.
3 out of 10.