Overall Rating
 Awesome: 49.11%
Worth A Look: 29.46%
Average: 6.7%
Pretty Bad: 5.36%
Total Crap: 9.38%
10 reviews, 164 user ratings
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| Casino Royale (2006) |
by Erik Childress
"Blondes DO Have More Fun - And Kick Ass Too!"
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The Bond series has been on autopilot for a long, long time now. A proven cash cow with a checklist for what audiences expect tends to result in complacency even while the stunt people are given bigger insurance policies. You need a big villain with an outlandish plot. Give Bond a beautiful girl to match wits and skin with. Give the villain one too that Bond can mess around with occasionally. Throw in the familiar catch phrases about martinis and name dropping around the elaborate action scenes and, voila, you have a Bond film. The Pierce Brosnan years were an exercise in been there and done that despite a kickoff in Goldeneye that suggested a psychology into Bond’s behavior was going to be introduced after the two underappreciated efforts from Timothy Dalton that were highly criticized by fans for his cold portrayal of the man they all wanted to be. Brosnan’s final turn, Die Another Day, was reduced to homages and in-jokes to the iconic 40 year-old franchise, so it only makes sense that they would go back to Ian Fleming’s beginnings with the same director, Martin Campbell, who kicked off the Brosnan run now kickstarting the Daniel Craig years. Heavy on psychology for sure with a structure certain to puzzle hardcore fans, but nevertheless, we haven’t seen this good a Bond film in at least half of those 40 years.Going as far back as the literal beginning of Bond (despite being set in present time), ol’ James has just been granted double-O status and is taking advantage of it. A history of zero kills doesn’t make it to the opening credits as this film establishes right off (in black-and-white, no less) that Daniel Craig's Bond is a head-smashin’, cold-blooded killer. And after another weak entry into the theme song canon, audiences may be surprised that the construction of this adventure is not of the meglomaniacal domination sort, but a more fully realized 21st century take with influences from 9/11 to the national poker craze. But that’s putting it lightly.
The villain of the piece is known as Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) who contains the signature nemesis quirk (a scarred eye that occasionally weeps blood) but not those shared by the various parodies born out of the enemies bent to either take over or wipe out the world. No, this one is a money man; a funder of international terrorism and (just like the U.S.) is in enormous debt. The creditors (with machetes and guns) are calling more frequently and his last hope is a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ‘Em (in the book it was Baccarat) with an invitation-only crowd that Bond plans to be a part of. That’s when treasury official, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) makes his acquaintance, fronting him the $10 million buy-in and sizing the agent up just as quickly as any mortal man would her.
Flipping over cards while everyone stares intently may not be your idea of intensity, particularly if you have no idea of what the best hand is. Afficionados of Rounders or the World Series of Poker telecasts though will appreciate that Casino Royale just doesn’t lay the cards on the table, but is unveiled much in the same fashion as a climactic round. After anteing up at the box office, you are dealt a pair of high cards underneath before the opening credits. The flop is unveiled in the first hour, three cards destined to improve your hand. The turn then occurs at the hour mark as the bluff on Le Chiffre takes center stage and, finally, the river card presents itself an hour later forcing you to reevaluate your cards and make a final decision to go all in with this version of Bond or to just check and move on.
After the first hour, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t prematurely throw all their chips into the middle in confidence of what Martin Campbell has dealt them. With the exception of the death-defying, gravity-thumbing stunts in District B13, there hasn’t been as exhilarating an action sequence as the chase through a construction site and foreign embassy that looks as if both parties took an advanced course in Parkour and Wu-Xia. Everything about this moment is so perfectly edited and filmed that its not out of the realm that its explosive conclusion (less than a half-hour into the proceedings) will be met with the kind of thunderous applause that Western audiences provided upon their first viewing of the Michelle Yeoh/Zhang Ziyi battle in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. To further prove that Bondian stuntwork can be met with awe instead of laughable improbability, Campbell delivers a second set piece from a museum to an airport with nearly equal aplomb paying homage to the decade of the last solid Bond adventures with nods to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
These bits are so front-loaded in Casino Royale though that it may keep theater goers leaning over in anticipation of the next volatile bit of action. Instead, it does give way to the poker match, both at the table and in the relationship with Miss Lynd. If you remember (and perhaps squinted) at the assertion in Goldeneye that Bond may still hear the screams of all his victims, you may still not be ready for Bond’s psyche to be broken down by the women in his life. First by “M” (Judi Dench) and then by Vesper, if you drank a dry martini everytime the word “ego” is thrown about, you’ll be shakin’ and stirrin’ around a vomit-filled toilet. But as this is Bond Beginnings (as the old WB might have put it), it makes sense that it be woman trying to get all his ribs and why he would spend the rest of the franchise trying to get them back. It works though not just because the credited writers (Neal Purvis, Robert Wade & Paul Haggis) introduce such a dialogue but that his wholly significant other has not been decimated into a Denise Richards or Halle Berry (both whose looks far outweigh their other talents.) Eva Green utilizes her time as a Bond girl to accentuate the mysteriousness. She does more with an evening dress than any waterlogged knife-carrier can once they open their mouths and, in essence, creates a character of both brains and vulnerability that gains greater resonance as the film continues. (Anyone disappointed with her wardrobe decisions – go rent Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers and thank me later.)It’s almost impossible for the final 80 minutes to live up to the action in the first 60, although they do try with a staircase battle and a climactic decimation which has so clearly been designed to mend the anti-climax of the book and give audience’s one last thrill. This tale of two halves may leave spectators a bit less enthused on the way out as they try to mend precisely what the evildoer’s plot was all about; a task that “M” tries to get across with all the subtlety of the doctor in Psycho or Giancarlo Giannini being forced to play Phil Gordon for the audience; the only real ridiculous moment in a film that could easily have had many. Daniel Craig seriously creates the most believable Bond since the days of Connery and for the first time in decades, I left the theater with the distinct reaction that I wanted to be James Bond.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15275&reviewer=198
originally posted: 11/17/06 01:32:38
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USA
17-Nov-2006 (PG-13)
DVD: 13-Mar-2007
UK
17-Nov-2006
Australia
07-Dec-2006
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