CASINO ROYALE – New Bond Shakes (Not Stirs) Up Old Spy Series

By Brian Abrams

James Bond is an icon we all know and love. Black or white, male or female, it doesn’t matter – who wouldn’t admire a fellow whose job is to sport $1000 tuxedos, trash luxury sports cars, sleep with perfect tens, and kick the shit out of international creeps?

But when Columbia Pictures announced Daniel Craig as the new 007, I had my reservations. His frowning face, gruff speech, and robotic gait expressed in films like Munich and Layer Cake didn’t remind me of the sophisticated spy who’s been slurping martinis on the job since The Beatles topped the Billboard charts. Rather, Craig just embodied the typical middlebrow brute, no different than a walk-on in a Mike Hodges’ gangster film or one of the forgettable caricatures from Guy Ritchie’s Snatch.

And yet, this thuggish persona works perfectly for Casino Royale.

The twenty-first film in the series has the same conspiracy theory plot structure as any of its predecessors – this time our hero has to take down a global terrorist organization and the scumbags who fund it – but this time we’re shown a darker side of Bond, one that’s without the unnecessary polish of the prior British babbling actors. It’s refreshing to have a secret agent so cold and calculated, an attitude not seen on screen since Sean Connery sported the secret agent’s tux and tails.

Because after the original Bond actor bowed out back in the 60s, the titular role for the series was given to a bunch of weak-at-the-knees Englishmen. Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan – they would all be more convincing as a maitre d’ at a posh European dining room or a cheeky host on a family-friendly game show, not a secret agent/killing machine. And Craig is nothing like ‘em.

Director Martin Campbell (GoldenEye) doesn’t try to push those former qualities onto the 38-year old and, instead, lets the buzzed-cut tough guy get right down to Bond business. That is, killing all the bad guys, doing all the bad girls, and gambling 10 million pounds of government money on a poker game in Montenegro.

Of course, the film doesn’t go without classic Bond tropes, such as a vicious Euro-trash nemesis (played by Danish film star Mads Mikkelsen) and an irresistible piece of arm candy (The Dreamers’ Eva Green). True, these are clichés found in any of the films based on Ian Fleming’s novellas, but they all feel brand new to me, totally revived, and credit goes to the new face and name attached to an old friend.