James Bond needed a drink, writes our Movie Blogger Carl Jones. He’d just lost 10 million dollars in the casino, and felt the urge to drown his sorrows with a trademark vodka martini.
“Shaken or stirred sir?” the barman asked.
“Do I look like a give a damn,” came 007’s frosty reply.
Make no mistake, Casino Royale is a Bond movie like no other. Gone are the gimmicks, the raised eyebrows, self-deprecating humour and outlandish gadgets.
In their place is a raw, streetfighting mean machine who is vulnerable, rough around the edges and prone to making mistakes. A man who is, frankly, not always easy to like.
This is James Bond: The Beginning. An uncompromising film which presents Ian Fleming’s secret agent with a cinematic backstory for the first time in more than 40 years.
Daniel Craig veritably explodes into the role which Pierce Brosnan inhabited so effortlessly over the past decade, giving the secret agent a menacing air of danger and undercurrent of unpredictability.
If audiences found the transition from easygoing Roger Moore to intense Timothy Dalton too much to swallow in the 1980s, Brosnan fans will be choking on their popcorn at this latest mood switch.
Muscles rippling and icy blue eyes glaring, Craig makes the role his own to such a degree that it’s almost impossible to even attempt comparisons with his predecessors. This man’s not a catalogue model for the latest Brioni suits or Omega watches . . . he can act, and is spoiling for a fight.
The pre-credits sequence sets the no-nonsense tone as it shows, in gritty black and white footage, how Bond earns his double-o number by making two kills. One is drowned in a toilet pan after a bloody brawl, and the other assassinated in cold blood. Not an exploding briefcase or ejector seat in sight.
Then, it’s straight into Bond’s first mission with his licence to kill, tracking down an arms dealer in the jungles of Madagascar and breaking all diplomatic rules by blundering into a foreign embassy and half demolishing it.
The trail eventually leads him to ruthless money-launderer Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), private banker to the world’s terrorists, with a scar over the left eye and tendency to bleed from his tear duct when he’s under pressure.
Which is now - he’s gambled with other people’s money, lost a fortune, and is desperately trying to save his skin by getting it all back in a winner-takes-all poker showdown at Casino Royale.
Spymaster M (Judi Dench) decides Bond is the best poker player in the service, and sends him off to Montenegro with 10 million dollars of Government cash and orders to defeat Le Chiffre, signing his death warrant.
Not entirely trusting 007, however, she assigns feisty MI6 accountant Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) to accompany him, and keep an eye on the treasury’s funds.
After an initially frosty clash of egos when they first meet on a train - one of the movie’s best moments - Bond and Vesper slowly begin falling in love.
Craig throws himself at the task of becoming the cinema’s sixth Bond with steely determination. His casting proved controversial among many fans who dismissed him as too short, too blond and lacking the suave style that has made cinematic 007 a worldwide institution.
But he’s probably the first man since Sean Connery to really convince us that he could look after himself in the uncompromising world of espionage. He’s a plausible, edgy and tormented character.
A couple of his scenes with the smouldering, stylish, mysterious Green are supercharged with chemistry (it would have been nice to dedicate even more of the lengthy 144-minute screen time to their verbal interplay, perhaps), while a torture ordeal with naked 007 shackled to a chair by a vengeful Le Chiffre is leg-crossingly effective.
And the amusing one liners? Well there are a few rather more subtle and ironic offerings, courtesy of both 007 and M (Miss Moneypenny and Q are nowhere to be seen), but you get the sense they’ve been added through slightly gritted teeth.
For this Bond is no laughing matter. Casino Royale doesn’t skimp on the action, from a breathtaking fist-fight on top of a crane to an explosive oil tanker chase at Miami airport and high-tempo pursuit in the latest Aston Martin, although the complexity of the story may fly over the heads of some younger viewers.
In the Brosnan era, they had Q’s gimmicks, crazy sci-fi ideas like invisible cars and computer-generated action to keep them entertained. No such luxury here. This time they have gambling tables and poker - and the scenes do drag just a little.
Thankfully, though, after the cringeworthy OTT antics of Die Another Day where technology overwhelmed the story and turned it into a cross between a tacky Star Trek episode and an overblown MTV video, energetic director Martin Campbell has kept this one real.
Jetting from Prague to Miami and the azure blue seas of the Bahamas, with picturesque stop-offs in Venice and Italy’s Lake Como, he’s delivered a beautifully photographed, slick, full-on spy adventure. As tough as a 12A certificate film can be.
So it’s mission accomplished, James Bond is safely reinvented yet again for a new generation and Daniel Craig has answered most of his critics.
Drop the 38-year-old into one of Brosnan’s old scripts and he’d flounder. But keep writing to his strengths and serving up aggression and attitude like this, and he’ll shine.
Casino Royale is more than just a great James Bond film. It’s a fabulously gritty movie in its own right . . . truly licenced to thrill.
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