Casino Royal Flush
[spoilers follow]
As a fan of Bond, both books and film, I was quite nervous about the reboot that was to star Daniel Craig. I had my own view of how Bond looked and like most fans, I suppose I saw him as tall, broadchested yet trim, dark and aristocratic. Craig is more like a blond barrel so I was sceptical.
But I was willing to give him a chance and, as all Bond fans know, there had never been a good version of Casino Royale, so there was a possibility that they would be faithful to the book.
The cold open showed that Craig could do brutal and cold blooded. And by god, could he! But how would he fit the famous tuxedo? As it turns out, brilliantly. Craig in Casino Royale is quintessential Bond and the film is a fit setting for him. Faithful to the book (yay), even the upgrade to the more topical poker (hilariously badly presented) could not spoil what for me is the pinnacle of Bond. This is how all Bond films should be: witty, hard, exciting but not action led, brutal, coherent and just this side of taxing.
Craig is aided by what has to be the best Bond girl yet. Eva Green is dynamite as Vesper Lynd. It helps that she gets all the best lines but she doesn't flub them. She's astonishingly good-looking, of course, but not just a pretty face. She's easily Craig's equal as an actor. That's how you do Bond girl (and look, there's no way Olga Kurylenko could match that performance, even if QOS had given her the opportunity).
The action is top rate. There isn't a huge amount and to be honest, most of the better Bonds have been light on the action and made really good use of what they had. It was clever stuff: the defibrillator scene is sharp, the fights are shot to perfection, and the setpiece stunt scenes are thrilling. It absolutely pumps when it has to. And when it's not pumping, you can feel the tension of a film that's biding its time.
Key to a great Bond film is a great villain. It's no surprise that weaker films -- for instance, Sceptre -- suffer from having poorly written and poorly cast villains, and the stronger ones have great campy nutjobs who use just enough subtlety to shade their characters. Mads Mikkelsen is a smirking autist who cries blood (and us aspies make great villain material, obv.) -- and he has an edge of transgression that overflows when for someone reason he tortures Bond by stripping him naked (and pauses to admire his physique) and playing with his balls. You can imagine him masturbating between swings of the rope. You can *feel* the sexual tension. And he isn't all powerful or even particularly clever. He is on the back foot from the start, desperate to get square before he gets killed.
So yeah, the reboot worked. More than that. This is not just probably the best Bond film they have made. It was a genuinely good film. I seem to recall some talk of Oscars. And that would really not have been insane. It's that good. It's the only Bond film I can just say, A is for awesome, and I wouldn't even fight you if you disagreed. I'd just assume you didn't know a thing about films in general, or genre in particular. This is why I for one go to watch every new Bond film in the cinema. Because there's just the chance there'll be another Casino Royale.
posted by Dr Zen @ 8:15 pm
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