Good-Looking But Lacklustre James Bond Adventure With A Boring Storyline

Rating: 5/10 (6 May 2007)

British secret-agent James Bond is investigating a corrupt banker called Le Chiffre, who specialises in investing funds from dictators and terrorists. After Bond foils a bomb attack on an aircraft, Le Chiffre fronts a high-stakes poker game in an attempt to win back his losses. Bond joins the game and locks wits with his foe.
This is the twenty-first official James Bond flick, featuring a new actor in the part and filming the only one of Ian Fleming's novels which hadn't been done (if you don't count a stupid but fun spoof version made in 1967). It looks sensationally glamorous, it's very well made, and it courageously dumps all the Roger Moore comedy and tries to present Bond in the more hard-edged Timothy Dalton mold, but it makes a terrible gaffe - it doesn't have any action. It starts off with an outstanding eight-minute sequence featuring Foucan, with delirious jumping stuntwork through a construction site and then a firefight in an embassy, but nothing afterwards comes even close to being as exciting. The airport rescue scene is okay but anticlimactic, but is followed by an interminable hour of mostly poker scenes (five minutes would have done) and soppy luvvy-duvvy stuff. At one point Bond jumps in his natty new Aston Martin DBR9 and you think, here we go - car chase - but it lasts exactly one corner ! There's a better car chase in Terms Of Endearment ! I guess the writers were trying to be faithful to the book, but a James Bond flick with no action is like an adult movie with no sex. Worse still, the plot is confusing and cheap; Green's dramatic death by drowning is bizarre - she locks herself in the lift, effectively committing suicide, and Le Chiffre's masterplan - get rich by investing blood money - is pretty dull. I also hate the way Le Chiffre's faked death is handled. This common plot twist can be done well (for example, in A Return To Salem's Lot) but here we see the character with a bullet-hole in his head, only to have him turn up later wearing a hat and shades so we're not even sure if it's him. Jeez, that sucks. Poor Craig is left to struggle with the script and the tone of the character, but actually manages to come off quite well, at least when he's allowed to make Bond a hard-hearted narcissist. But Danish actor Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre (the French word for number) is given very little to do - how scary can you be playing cards ? The decision to drop the iconography of the series - Q, Moneypenny, gadgets, secret lairs - maybe creates some credibility, but takes away half the fun, and a James Bond film should always be fun. This only just makes the grade as good entertainment and without the Foucan sequence it wouldn't; the producers should check out the current movies of Zhang Yimou - now that's action film-making. Shot in the Czech Republic, Nassau, Venice and Pinewood.