Casino Royale (2006)

After Die Another Day nearly killed the franchise with excess, Casino Royale is exactly the course correction audiences needed, expected, and desired from James Bond.  Perhaps the greatest thing about Casino Royale is how it desperately wants the audience’s faith in the franchise, coupled with how brilliantly the film achieves that goal.

Casino Royale reboots the franchise to the early days of James Bond (Daniel Craig), newly minted as Agent 007 in the 00 division of MI6.  In the wake of his pursuit of a small-time bombmaker, Bond follows the trail of clues to the Bahamas, then Montenegro, where he is enlisted in a high-stakes poker game against terrorist financier Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen).  Armed with $15 million courtesy of treasury agent Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), Bond must bankrupt Le Chiffre, an expert poker player who already knows Bond is coming for him.

From the black-and-white precredits sequence, which almost makes one wish the whole film had been shot monochromatically, what is immediately striking is just how visceral Casino Royale is.  Doubtless this is the casualty of living in the shadow of The Bourne Identity (released the same year as Die Another Day), which is widely credited with injecting a healthy dose of gritty realism into the spy film genre, but Casino Royale never seems like it’s aping someone else’s act; rather, the film succeeds by adapting the lessons in realism from Bourne into the preexisting template of what a Bond film should be.

That lesson is to step away from all the theatricality of the Bond films because they often made the character a pawn in a larger-than-life aesthetic catastrophe.  Take Moonraker, which tried to up the scales by sending Bond to outer space but succeeding only in escaping the gravitational pull of being watchable.  Consider the other space laser in the Bond canon, Die Another Day, a frigid mess unwilling to commit to tonal consistency.  No, it’s impossible not to hear the voice of director Martin Campbell, who had helmed Goldeneye to great success, shouting at the previous films, “Look what you’ve done to the place!”  You can’t tell me that it’s an accident that Campbell was summoned back to right the ship, because as before he excels at exactly this sort of thing.

Once more, Campbell is asked to introduce us to a new Bond, Daniel Craig.  Dubbed “James Blond” by viewers focusing on entirely the wrong aspect of his performance, Craig brings an icy exterior to Bond, his sense of humor coming less from a place of self-confidence and more from a Dalton-esque disdain for his enemies.  Where Connery and Moore delivered the one-liners with a wink and a slight smirk, Craig manages to be deadly serious about being clever, something that really comes out in subsequent viewings beyond the initial shock of thinking he’s not very funny.  We have to remember that this is an early Bond, a prequel reboot (a preboot?), and Craig does a first-rate job of giving us glimmers of the Bond we expect to see while layering in psychological nuance.

Something we’ll really see developed in the Craig era is the relationship between Bond and M.  Judi Dench is held over from the Brosnan films, and thank God for that because she’s bloody brilliant.  From her very first scene in Casino Royale, which finds her refusing to let her assistant get a word in edgewise, Dench is inspired casting, continuing her force-of-nature portrayal of the head of MI6.  Her relationship with Bond is especially compelling, not quite maternal but oddly affectionate nonetheless.  M is clearly confident in the abilities of her newly-promoted protégé, initially without cause, and this faith in Bond is much more engaging than the steely nature of the male Ms before her.  I’ll never complain any time Judi Dench shows up anywhere, and the apparent continuity contradiction of her presence shouldn’t bother anyone in the slightest because her M is a fantastic addition to the Bond canon.  (If it truly distresses you, just imagine that “James Bond” is a codename and not a real name.  It’ll also explain why a secret agent is so flippant about using his real name.)

I could take a few paragraphs to say effusive things about Mikkelsen and Green, but the thrust of it is that they fit perfectly with the more grounded ethos of Casino Royale and their performances are delightful updates on the “Bond baddie” and “Bond girl” (respectively).  What I’m more struck by, though, is how effective a director Campbell is, measurable by his dexterity with purely visual language.  There are many sequences that proceed without dialogue, yet the film communicates it all deftly.  We don’t need to be told, for example, that Bond is putting on a façade each time he plays it cool, because Campbell gets a hell of a performance out of Craig.  The brief moments of running commentary during the poker games feel slightly abrasive because the film works so strongly with the visual, even for someone who knows little about card games.  The action sequences – which, incidentally, are stellar – bear the mark of solid direction, both for remaining exciting and for slickly refusing to call attention to themselves.  Bond’s chase-parkour-siege sequence early in the film never flounders, and it’s to Campbell’s credit that he stages a stairwell fistfight with as much dexterous grace as Bond’s attempt to discern Le Chiffre’s ‘tell.’

If I have a complaint about Casino Royale, it’s that it ends twice when the first conclusion would have sufficed.  But the second ending does set up a vital piece of Bond’s character – his detached womanizing – and gives us the dynamite last shot in which 007 finally delivers the one line you’ve been waiting the whole time.  Once those five words get spoken and the film cuts to black with the musical sting you’ve also been anticipating (I won’t spoil either, but true believers know which ones I mean), I can’t imagine anyone not feeling a strong chill of accomplishment up the spine with an awed murmur of “And we’re back.”  “James Bond will return,” the credits promise in that noble tradition, but Casino Royale has demonstrated that Bond has already returned.  And we’re back.

Casino Royale is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violent action, a scene of torture, sexual content and nudity.”  While the violence isn’t pervasive, it is quite intense when it happens; the fight scenes are very well choreographed, and they feel very visceral, including a scene in which a nude Bond (nothing is shown) is assaulted with a carpet beater.  Bond has romantic encounters with two women who don’t show anything more than their neckline.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Quantum of Solace (2008) on November 7, 2014!