Casino Royale

With more than 20 films to his credit, Ian Fleming’s James Bond character has become one of the most prolific and iconic action heroes of our time. The buzz about director Martin Campbell’s latest incarnation of the classic British spy is twofold: 1) Bond is played by yet another actor (Daniel Craig) and 2) it relaunches and literally retells the Bond story from its beginning as if the decades worth of previous films had never happened at all. The notion of recreating Bond comes well after he’d already been driven into utter creative oblivion with Die Another Day, a film whose climax involved an invisible car speeding through a fortress made of ice that was being melted by a laser beam from outer space. Casino Royale reestablishes Bond in a surrealistic but never overly ludicrous world of espionage that has its fair share of high speed chases and adrenaline pumping acion sequences, but still finds some time to tend to the creative elements of the characters behind the guns.

New Bond Daniel Craig is a nice fit for the role, bringing a sense of brooding and a muted excitement to a character that otherwise appears to be a stone-faced cad. He’s more than matched by the charismatic Eva Green who here plays Vesper Lynd, the latest in a long line of Bond beauties. Green (who made her stunning debut in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers) is an extraordinary actress who molds a smart, charming, and mysterious character. Her entrance into the film breathes new life into the story and creates a much needed dynamic with the Bond character.

My greatest complaint about this film is its length and its occasional bouts with incoherence. After its wonderfully vicious opening sequence, the film dallies in a tedious and overly explosive setup before finally making its way to the titular casino and introducing us to Vesper Lynd. The casino game and the violence and drama that surround it really make up the core of the film. It’s in this setting that we get to see the reckless fun and painful consequences that really come with life as James Bond. However, once this midsection of the film has concluded, the movie once again gets swept off its feet and ends up sprinting endlessly from one conclusion to another. There’s such vagueness to its plot that the film lacks a clear sense of progression. It tends to exist in the moment without an entirely clear sense of what is really happening and why the characters should want it to happen in the first place. The characters are so believable and sympathetic at times (mostly during that casino bit), but once we lose our grip on who they are and what they’re after they become unrelatable and a tad cartoonish. Despite its efforts to have real drama amidst the mayhem, the characters do inevitably become somewhat drowned out by a meandering plot and over the top action sequences.

It’s genuinely hard to critique something like this for crimes against realism or for partaking in overindulgence. Isn’t indulgence the greatest trademark of the whole Bond franchise? What I like about this film is that it gives you enough of a mixed bag that you will most likely be satisfied to some extent no matter what style of movie you prefer. To call it a thinking man’s spectacle would be an overstatement, but it is something along those lines. You can experience it as exciting popcorn munching fun or think heavily and haughtily about the Bond character in terms of his relationships and his never ending defensiveness. The film is like a blueprint for a character we already know and it really goes through the appreciable trouble of planting the seeds for the Bond that will someday probably be once again in an ice fortress with an invisible car. Cherish the fact that right now the producers of these films care enough about quality to give this character decent treatment and a grounded (although notably unrealistic and unclear) story. Casino Royale is not a brilliant film, but it is carefully calculated madcap fun and should be both enjoyed and pondered. It offers sheer excitement and a keen insight into a character that has been an enduring part of world culture for nearly half a century.

Grade: B