All the Right Cards
Re-invigorating "Casino Royale" plays from a full deck. (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Best Bond movie. Ever. Hands down.
The Downside: Its touchdown isn't quite graceful.
James Bond as clock puncher?
Sorry, Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore because this is not the same kind of Mission: Improbable playboy superspy with tailor-made Italian suits, rocket-powered European sports cars out of a Japanese anime flick, and perfectly coifed hair that could deflect bullets on its own. This isn't Sean Connery Bond, or any Bond you've ever seen, heard of, or imagined. What's old is new again and this is not your father's double-oh-seven.
Call it irony or delayed serendipity that Casino Royale, definitely the best James Bond movie in 15 years and arguably the best one ever (I'll make my case for this later) is being shot to us under the radar by Martin Campbell, the same director who brought 007 into the Nintendo/Playstation age with the dreadful Pierce Brosnan non-starter GoldenEye. You can't call it penance- GoldenEye was a far bigger hit than it should have been with its limp-footed acting and sorry dialogue, but perhaps in the eleven years since, Campbell's seen a franchise that actually began as a piece of hokey adolescent daydream fodder before he got his hands on it descend even further into pop culture irrelevance, a decompressive feeling George Lucas must be experiencing about now. What could, in the beginning, be argued as zippy, campy fun mutated over time into screen tests for stuntmen, pyrotechnicians, and untalented stand up comedians respectively with everything that could conceivably considered cool about Bond fallen and forgotten.
It isn't that Casino Royale carries us in a time machine- it recreates its iconic hero in a forge untainted by self-referential awareness and id enthrall and invents something that probably looks quite alien to the Bond that author Ian Fleming initially intended, but oddly feels at home- like this is the sharp-minded MI6 fix-it guy who should have been flickering before our eyes all along. Gone is the visage of Bond as a spoiled rich brat who decided to play spy because he had nothing better to do, a feeling always hanging over the character and became as pronounced as a megaphone after Roger Moore stepped onto the stage. This is as close as we've ever had to a blue collar, working class James Bond- one who knows how to make nice with the ladies, but puts the champaign away when there's a job to do and one who doesn't need hi-tech gadgets shoved up every orifice when a good chase and the butt of a pistol to the base of the skull will do just as well. He does get to don the expensive tuxes and drive the oh-baby cars (Mr. Aston Martin, we've missed ya...), but the amazing illusion trick Daniel Craig pulls of is making his Bond as a man who enjoys, but is not tied to luxurious tastes. When he sits down to a mega-high stakes Montenegro poker match decked to the nines, the duds are little more than the latex plastic masks in Mission: Impossible: a practical, impenetrable disguise of flamboyant sophistication for a man who not only doesn't mind getting his hands dirty, but considers it a job perk. A few purists might get their leather holsters in a bunch since this remake of Casino Royale (it was previously a spy-movie spoof starring David Niven) shares thicker bloodlines to the put-their-heads-through-a-plate-glass-window spiritualism of the more "rough n' rumble" secret agents of Ludlum's Jason Bourne universe or Tom Clancy's John Clark than to what has become the popularly accepted template for Mr. 007. This being said, it's stunning what Casino Royale gets right in style and attitude by showing what its predecessors did so very, very wrong.
Based on the first book by Fleming in 1953, Casino is Bond at his genesis; during a stark black and white opener he gathers the two kills needed to register "double-oh" status, one of which requires him to find rather creative uses for bathroom fixtures. Since everything is in rewind, most everything symbolic of the series from Monty Norman's theme music to Bond's particulars in drink (when asked by a bartender if he wants his vodka martini shaken or stirred, he responds with a growling, "Does it look like I give a damn?") are either delayed or not present at all. Now part of the MI6 inner sanctum and a certified royal pain in the arse for section chief M (Judi Dench), Bond's delegated to go face-to-face with Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), a kind of international banker to the terrorist stars who's been strapped for cash lately after his invested blood money was blown on a terrorist strike thwarted by Bond. The plan: hand Le Chiffre's royal flush butt to him on the poker table to squeeze him into rolling on his gun-toting cronies in exchange for protection.
More than enough grief was cried over the choice of Craig to pick up Brosnan's torch (He doesn't like guns! He wears a life jacket on a boat! He's too blonde!). I'm not even going to try getting into the infernal argument of where he falls in the immortal line-up dating back to Dr. No since the Bond he plays is so distinct from any of the others, but his presence in Casino Royale is one-half inspired, one-half subversive. Craig first got noticed playing a London drug dealer with Machiavellian tendencies in Layer Cake, and in a way his take on Bond isn't that separate- both cruelly whip-smart, both are men whose moral stoplight has been taken down for repairs. After gunning down an unarmed terrorist functionary in a Madagascar embassy, his reasoning is pure Darwinian- intelligence be damned, wouldn't the world be better off with one less bomb maker? Following years and years of watching the character devolve into an animated action figure, Craig is probably the first to really nail home the hungry predator Bond really is. During one electrifying set piece- an almost physics-breaking gymnastics chase through a high-rise construction sight, the quick facial close-ups show the mental cogs meshing, the action melting into a gun-toting chess match with Craig thinking three moves ahead.
The rest of the cast is also suitably grounded- Eva Green (Kingdom of Heaven) makes for a luminous presence as the MI6 banker who bankrolls Bond's entry into the Montenegro game and always keeps a keen eye on her "investment." Reliable Italian screen legend Giancarlo Giannini appears as a British intelligence contact who has his own laid-back way of doing things. Mikkelsen is hardly the most frightening Bond foe ever, which is Casino's sly intent- it's fairly neat to have a bad guy who himself is ready to wet his pants in the crosshairs of even bigger fish with bigger guns. And in the same unassuming theme of the film, the villains are refreshingly low-tech- why bother torturing your double-oh agent with a very slowly moving laser when you can just crack their nether regions with a rock sack to a much more squeamish effect? There are a lot of thrills in Casino Royale, but probably the biggest is the way Craig jettisons the dry, preppy humor of the past and meets his torment with the kind of guttural humor of a rowdy tavern patron.
Is Casino Royale the best James Bond has seen? Most would probably say no, and the disfiguring series of false endings the movie trips on doesn't help, but for them the bronze statue of Connery looms tall and untouchable. Personally, I thought Connery made a great James Bond, but the movies were still too much doused in Cold War kitsch to be taken seriously. Casino Royale may signal the start of a new era; a darker, more procedural Bond whose I've-got-work-to-do aplomb makes up for the prissy stuffiness of the past. A new look when all that makes 007 tick isn't just off-the-cuff branding, when we can actually get a thrill from hearing, "My name is Bond. James Bond."
Yes he is. A
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