Bond goes gritty and realistic, and works wonders

Rating: 9/10 (28 March 2007)

My girlfriend is a Bond freak. She owns every DVD, and almost every VHS. She has three copies of some of them. Thusly, I've seen all of them, from the first to the last.
Having been given the benefit of understanding the progression of the films to the most recent, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw Casino Royale.
Gone were the goofy gimmicks of invisible cars and x ray sunglasses, and gone were the unrealistic, corny plots.
This Bond got real in a big way, and revitalized the franchise.
As everyone knows, the films rest heavily on the performance of the title role, and Daniel Craig was definitely a risk. He's blond, he's got blue eyes, and he definitely hasn't played this role before.
He also hit the ball out of the park with his performance. Gritty, raw, but with an emotional depth that was lacking in Timothy Dalton's far-too-serious Bond, Craig split the emotional double role right down the middle, making his character more human in the process.
That doesn't mean he can't be tough. His fight scenes and chases had a brutal reality that was totally absent from perhaps the last six Bond films, which had relied on increasingly stylized fighting to wow the audience with visual flair that defied reality.
Craig and the film crew brought the brutal realism back with a vengeance. You felt the informant's head crashing through the porcelain of the sink. You raced into the room with Bond as he chased the bad guy.
He brought you into the scene with him.
My complaints lie in the latter parts of the film. I consider this film to be essentially two in one. I can't tell you what that is, or I'd spoil it, but considering this monster's record length, you can figure there's a lot of plot in there. It could have been split in two, had 20 minutes added to each end, and been two very successful films.
When it does transition over is the problem. All too quickly does it race into the romantic aspects, only to be tossed into act two with breakneck speed. I didn't expect this, and was wondering why the movie kept going.
Not that every moment wasn't really necessary. There's no filler material here, but it's so high energy the whole way through that it's exhaustive just to watch. But it's worth it. See it and understand. Bond is back, and Craig has made the role his own.