Good back-to-basics Bond film

Rating: 8/10 (11 December 2006)

I haven't been to a Bond film in years- the election of Pierce Brosnan as Timothy Dalton's successor had me about convinced that the genre was spiritually and brain-dead. But when Daniel Craig came along and brought, from all reports, a harder, grittier, more back-to-basics Bond with him, I wondered if this wasn't worth seeing...
The answer, obviously, is yes. There are enough trappings of the classic Bond film franchise to make it familiar to the partisans of the films over the books - the obligatory unbelievable opening chase scene, for example - but this is Bond the way Ian Fleming would have wanted it. The subdued electricity of the casino scenes contrasted with the raw, elemental violence of the numerous killings that occur, coupled with the sexual tension between Bond and Vesper Lynd, have the feel of being lifted off Fleming's pages rather than being scripted.
There's updating of course- the game in this version is poker, not baccarat, and Le Chiffre finances Al Qaeda and the African militias - but these don't weaken the story; nor does the presentation of Bond as a newly-crowned Double-0 who's sometimes (read nearly always) too quick to resort to the gun.
The only real weakness I can assign to this film as a film is that it has too many endings. Bond being Bond, you know (spoiler alert) that the one where he and Vesper are retired and living happily ever after isn't going to last, but three separate final scenes after that? That's a bit much even for the hardened fan. At a certain point, I found myself wondering "When is this going to be over?" - not because it was a bad story, but just because they kept finding something else to tack onto the end.