Project Bond: Casino Royale (2006)

Meanwhile, back in the Eon series, Pierce Brosnan is gone, and Daniel Craig has arrived. This guy…this is my kinda guy.

The main role has been recast several times, but this is the first true reboot, with a young Bond just achieving 00 status at the start of the film. Everything has changed, except Judi Dench is still M. This doesn’t make much sense, but I’m certainly not complaining. The opening scene (rendered in black and white) sees Bond make the two kills required to earn his licence (to kill, not to drive). Immediately, I am a fan of the steely sass Craig brings to the character, and I couldn’t help grinning most of the way through the credits sequence (in which naked women silhouettes have been replaced with playing card imagery).

I’m not normally a fan of English accents, as they remind me of oppression, but Craig has an excellent voice. Only the second Englishman to play the role in the Eon franchise, Craig’s accent is far more fitting than Pierce Brosnan‘s mid-Atlantic nonsense, which was starting to grate. (I realised while watching Die Another Day that Brosnan sounds very like Gary Oldman, who recently said this.) Craig also doesn’t dress like the other Bonds, wearing short-sleeved shirts, patterned shirts, short-sleeved patterned shirts, and sometimes a suit without a tie! All of these things have been seen before, but rarely, whereas Craig’s Bond seems less concerned with always projecting the suave image favoured by his predecessors. He still cleans up nice, though, and he hasn’t forgotten the basic rules of etiquette that oblige one to change one’s shirt should one soak it in blood while beating someone to death in the middle of a poker game.

This being the first novel, it’s a little strange that Eon had not adapted it before, but I’m glad they left it as long as they did, because this version is excellent. Very truly fantastic and brilliant. It is unrecognisable from the David Niven film of the same name; there’s a casino in it, and the similarities more or less end there. Craig seems immediately very comfortable in the role of James Bond, Le Chiffre is one of the most intriguing villains, and Vesper one of the most memorable Bond Girls. The dynamic between Bond and Vesper is unlike any other in the series; it is quite clear that he does not often develop such feelings for a person, and even when they are at odds, there is a definite closeness between them. The ending is very different from most Bond films, with the mission uncompleted, and he doesn’t get the girl, which is almost unheard of.

Casino Royale breaks quite a few other traditions of the Bond series. For the first time, Miss Moneypenny does not feature, and Q is absent for just the second time. This is also the first Eon film not to open with a gun barrel sequence, and the first to incorporate it into the narrative, thusly framing Bond’s first kill at the start of the opening credits. The film seems to serve as a statement of intent for making progressive changes to the franchise, and left me really looking forward to the next one.