Much needed refresh of the series, but they bollocksed up the ending!

Rating: 8/10 (26 November 2006)

I haven't been to see a Bond movie in the theaters in 20 years, but I felt compelled to do so with Casino Royale. They promised an update to the tired franchise, and they delivered quite nicely.
I like that Bond is now tough. I couldn't believe Dalton, and especially Brosnan, were tough at all. Suave, perhaps, but not tough, and suave just doesn't carry an action movie very far any more. Craig was so well-cast as Bond in this updating, it's like the film was scripted around him. Finally we have a tough-guy Bond, someone who could have been a Navy Seal if he was an American.
I like that they've made him all business. In former Bond films, there were a few minutes with M giving him the mission, and then Bond would cavort all over the globe. This one, the "head office" is involved in the storyline. Makes much more sense.
I was a bit disappointed with the Bond gimmickry this time around. Bond always has cool cars and cool toys. Casino Royale definitely has some great cars, but the toys are pathetic: his cool car comes equipped with ... a defibrillator?? They should have just scrapped that scene completely, it is so out of place they should have bagged it.
I can understand why they included that particular scene. Much of Casino Royale centers around a high-stakes poker game. When they were going to start playing poker, I groaned. "Here comes the boredom", I said to myself. They tried to keep it interesting with regularly scheduled breaks, where Bond would get involved in fights. That worked great the first time (with a fairly exciting sword-in-the-stairwell fight), but then they put in this defibrillator scene. Goofy and a major plot hole. Why poison a player mid-game? Would a player who died during a game forfeit his chips? Sounds implausible.
But it's Bond, and plot holes are a Bond tradition. At least these writers tried to make a complex plot. A good friend of mine pointed out this was not a typical Bond plot: no army of bad guys working for a single leader that Bond must fight through a la Mortal Combat. This is a convoluted plot involving terrorist funding, insurance fraud, money laundering, and kidnapping. You do have to pay a bit of attention. I liked it. It's no Academy-award winner, but at least they tried to make it intriguing.
There is one glaring error that these writers made, however, one key point that I felt ruined the overall experience. They bollocksed up the ending! See, towards the end of the film Bond falls in love. Now, even mild Bond enthusiasts know James was married at one time. For this, the "reboot" of the series, they absolutely needed to answer the question: who was James Bond's wife? And it looked like they were going to do just that, with Eva Green looking fabulous as Vesper Lynd. There was this whole setup with the two of them running away from the spy business and enjoying life. But what did the writers do? They turned her into a turncoat, someone trying to save her own husband from capture by Algerians or something. Then the film runs on with Bond trying to kill her in an act of revenge.
The writers clearly blew it with that one. Here was their chance to put their permanent stamp on the series by showing us the circumstances around Bond's marriage and the eventual death of his spouse. It would have been the Bond equivalent of killing Spock in the second Star Trek movie: an iconic moment that would have made movie history and truly reinvigorated the series. But they went back to the same, tired, formulaic "surprise" ending. They either didn't have depth of vision, or they chickened out with such culture-defining material.
This movie was a welcome change for the Bond franchise, but it would have been spectacular if only the filmmakers had the foresight and capacity to finally tackle one of the greatest mysteries in the history of film: who was James Bond's wife.
8 out of 10, points taken off for this egregious oversight.
Barky