FILM REVIEW – CASINO ROYALE (2006).
A NEW bond film in more ways than one, introducing a younger, blonder
Bond, and taking the story back to its absolute origins. In effect, the
previous twenty Bond films no longer exist. This is Bond’s first outing.
Choosing to do
this with Casino Royale in particular is deliberate. The Ian Fleming book was
the first in the series, and apart from a spoof Bond movie of that name from
the mid 1960’s (with Peter Sellers and David Niven), the title is one of the
few not previously used in the films.
The last few Pierce
Brosnan movies were severely criticised for excessive use of spectacle and
gadgetry while having plots that made little sense. Even Brosnan joined in such
condemnation, partly contributing to his dismissal from the role.
Daniel Craig got
the role for a serious reworking of the series. He is more rugged, and fairer
in hair than any of his predecessors, and clearly approaches the role with a
darker, more sadistic edge. This is a relatively humourless killer Bond, a
sadistic man who will do anything it takes to get the job done.
The pre-credit
sequence, shot in grainy black and white is a flashback to Bond’s first 00
(license to kill) assignment. He talks at gunpoint to a traitor, who
boastingly tells him that the first killing is the worst (with a flashback
within a flashback to Bond desperately struggling to kill a man in a fight in a
public toilet block). Bond agrees that the second killing comes much more
easily and casually shoots down the man he is talking to, with complete
emotional detachment. He then starts shooting down the man’s various aides and
bodyguards. As one shot is fired, Craig is framed in the characteristic opening
credit gun barrel shoot and stare pose. However we get only the faintest echo
of the Bond theme itself as the title song kicks in. The credit sequence makes
all of its characters out of playing cards and focuses squarely on the violence
rather than the endless swirl of silhouetted naked girls that have
characterized many Bond film opening credit sequences.
Bond is now seen on
assignment again, taking down leads to a terrorist cell. He gives a
breath-taking chase through an African construction site, leaping girders and
climbing vertigo inducing cranes, before gunning down his target in the
sanctuary grounds of the man’s own embassy. His action causes a media furore
and a diplomatic incident. Bond finds himself confronted by M (played by Dame
Judi Dench in the only reprise role from the established films, though she is
surprisingly vulgar and surly now).
Moneypenny and Q are absent. This is only the third Bond film not to use
Q, after Dr. No and Live & Let Die.
Ordered by M to take
leave, Bond single-mindedly pursues a few tenuous clues from the Embassy hunt.
He provokes a number of ruthless individuals in a Caribbean Hotel he is staying
in. H takes part in poker game and wins one man’s Aston Martin, making it his own
9as opposed to being issued the car by MI5). One of the men he provokes may or
may not be a young Auric Goldfinger, hinting that the series might be bold
enough to remake the established Bond films in sequence. Bond’s main focus however is a spy with a
compulsion for gambling, who Bond soon discovers to be a terrorist intent on
sabotaging a new jet plane, the biggest in the World, on its maiden flight.
Bond gives chase,
disposing of one man in a strange airport art display depicting corpses playing
a game of cards 9to which the body of the murdered man is added), and in scenes
reminiscent of Bruce Willis’s Die Hard Two- Die Harder, he trashes half the
airport to save the plane. The fight on the petrol tanker truck is almost a
shot for shot reworking of the truck chase fight sequences in Raiders Of The
Lost Ark. Bond kills the terrorist with
his own bomb.
Bond, now backed by M
and MI5, learns that the man he killed at the airport were backed by a major
international financier, who is also a high league champion poker player. The
man, who cries tears of blood, uses his winnings to back such schemes. He may even have backed the 9/11
strike. Bond is given £50 Million to stake in a major game in
which the terrorist is playing. The game is to take place at the Casino Royale
of the title.
Given the sum he has
to play, Bond is sent with an accountant, the vivacious Vesper, one of the most
intelligent and ultimately tragic of all Bond girls. The sequence on the train
as she and Bond play Sherlock Holmes and deduce one another’s neuroses is
brilliant. Suddenly, the mostly silent
brooding Bond becomes quite conversational.
The poker game
itself is extremely tense, and the players eager to kill each other as well as
play. The villain has to play to recover the money lost by failing to blow up
the plane, and his opponents threaten him with death if he doesn’t. Bond kills
some of them as they leave the man’s room, which shocks Vesper.
Bond now plays a
dangerous hand, which backfires. He loses the English stake money. Vesper finds
that M is unwilling to send back up money, but Bond is approached by one Felix
Leiter, an American CIA agent familiar from other (now later) Bond adventures.
He agrees to stake Bond as long as he gets the villain for the US CIA. Bond
agrees.
As the game
recommences, Bond is poisoned with Digitalis in his drink. It almost kills him.
He is saved by the only use of heavy gadgetry in the film, when Bond tries to
revive himself from the impending coronary heart attack with a defibrillator
conveniently stored in his car by MI5. Vesper saves him when he actually dies,
by resuscitating him. Bond, refusing to go to hospital, immediately walks back
into the casino and casually wins all the money.
Inevitably there is
now a cycle of cross and double cross. Le’Chiffe escapes the CIA and kidnaps
Vesper. Bond crashes the Aston Martin giving chase, and faces one of the most
brutal torture scenes ever captured in a Bond film. Le’Chiffe doesn’t bother
with elaborate complex expensive machines. He simply strips Bond, and beats him
in the testicles with a knotted rope. Bond acts defiantly, but he clearly
scared and deeply vulnerable. Worse, he
hears similar abuse going on for Vesper in the next room of the abandoned
warehouse used.
Bond’s lot
seems hopeless. He seems to genuinely have no way out of this for once, but men
who kill Le’Chiffe, but let Bond and Vesper go, suddenly inexplicably rescue
him.
As Bond recovers in hospital, he and Vesper send the money to
MI5 by electronic password controlled transfer and then go on a long recovery
vacation together, (which takes up too
long and for Bond, seems surprisingly lacking in sex, passion and real
romance0. Arriving in Venice, Bond learns that Vesper has not in fact wired the
money out to London, but has arranged to give it to a new set of villains. She hasn’t betrayed Bond, but made a deal
with the rescuers to give them the money in order to save his life. As she takes the money to the ruthless
figures responsible, she is taken prisoner and Bond fights a desperate and
doomed attempt to save her in a Venetian villa, which is on renovation floats.
As the floats are ruptured, the whole building sinks spectacularly, with Vesper
trapped in a lift cage within. Bond fails to save her, and the one man to
survive Bond’s rampage steals the case containing the instructions for the
money transfer.
The film ends as Bond
catches up with him, kneecapping him and pointing a gun at the man, Bond
finally delivers the famous ‘The Name’s Bond, James Bond’ Line ad prepares to
quite obviously shot the man with a very large gun. The film now cuts to end
credits and finally we hear the James Bond theme itself. The New Bond has
arrived in considerable style.
A darker
Bond, despite his controversial fair hair, but a rather too cold one. The love
making scenes are devoid of warmth and feeling, while the killings are
committed with great relish. Gone are the bulk of gadgets, bar for the deeply
silly car resuscitation kit. The film
also refreshingly lacks a villain’s luxurious power base; the main set pieces
are building and demolition sites, dinghy crumbling warehouses, and open roads.
This is a Bond film from the Get Carter stable, brutal and nasty and without a
megalomaniac waving an atom bomb around. Craig definitely has presence and
appeal, and it is a very welcome addition to, if not a total reinventing of a
franchise that was in danger of running out of steam. What is clear is that Bond makes
mistakes; he kills men he is sent to catch alive; defies direct orders,
and has an arrogant attitude to his boss, even breaking into her house to talk
to her at one point, - He loses the English Stake money in the casino, he fails
to save Vesper, he gets caught easily by Le’Chiffe, - in reality such a track
record would soon get him sacked.
Somehow, however, it makes
him so much more human, instead of into
a cardboard cut out super-spy as he was in the Roger Moore days. For me
however, Connery remains the definitive Bond.
Arthur Chappell
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