It’s going to be a rather weird Christmas film season. Apart from the new James Bond movie and the fantasy Eragon, there is a dearth of big-budget blockbuster material clamouring for screen space and audience attention. The big franchises are silent: no Harry Potter, no Lord of the Rings, no Narnia … It feels as though the studios shot their bolt in mid-year, during the American summer holiday season.
Well, there are the cartoons — Flushed Away, from the makers of Wallace & Gromit, and Happy Feet, the dancing-penguin movie that swept Casino Royale off the top of the United States box-office heap after only one week. Animated movies are always good for the holiday season, I guess, and the lack of blockbuster contenders does mean a bit more space for unlikely Christmas-time releases such as the heroin drama Candy, starring Heath Ledger, and Martin Scorsese’s new gangster film, The Departed.
Despite its being bumped off the top spot in the US, Casino Royale has done and is doing very well in Europe, especially Britain. And it is, though this is no longer news, the best Bond movie in some time. Daniel Craig’s much-disputed debut as the superspy has probably renewed the franchise for another decade or so. Yes, the last Pierce Brosnan outing made nearly half a billion dollars, but, like BrosÂnan himself, the Bond movies had long become soulless. Brosnan’s Bond was a cipher. Craig brings a much-needed humanity to the role, and the film itself is grittier and less fantastical than other Bond movies of recent memory.
As the double-flashback intro suggests, this Casino Royale takes Bond back to his roots, even his beginnings as a secret agent, though the main part of it is set in 2006. It even has a reinvented title sequence — an animated one, nogal. Bond’s boss, M (Judi Dench) is still there: they could hardly have done without her, especially given the way she has made the role her own. But, just as this is the least gadgety Bond movie in decades, the gadgets expert Q, and/or his successor R (last played by John Cleese), is absent — as is Bond’s favourite flirt and M’s secretary, Miss Moneypenny.
Which tells us something about this Bond. This is a romantic Bond, not one who sleeps his way through the usual bevy of beauties, or even enjoys a meaningless flirt with Miss Moneypenny. That there is none of the usual bikini-clad line-up in Casino Royale, and the fact that we don’t miss it means that this reinterpretation of the character works. Instead of casual sex, so often followed in Bond’s life by murder, we have a central romantic attachment (to Eva Green as Vesper Lynd). As Ian Fleming wrote in the original 1953 novel, “Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.” Still, this is only the second Bond movie in which the secret agent falls in love.
But that doesn’t mean this is a drippy Bond. He may be sentimental, but he’s also super-sexy. Craig is the first Bond since Sean Connery to be able to take off his shirt with aplomb; here, he emerges from the sea wearing a swimming costume that might as well have been koki-penned on to his body. In the first Bond movie, Dr No, in 1962, it was Ursula Andress who rose like Venus from the sea; now it’s Craig (and all his new muscles) who gets that job. And well he does it, too.
He gets stripped naked later on in the movie, just to emphasise the point. This time, though, he’s getting tortured, as he does so often in the novels. This scene, and much else, survives from the Fleming novel, which is a good sign, in that Casino Royale has already been considerably messed with — it was turned into an American TV special, with an Americanised “Jimmy Bond”, in 1954, and was madly spoofed up in 1967, with a confusion of Bonds (including David Niven, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen) capering across the screen.
This Bond is no spoof. There are some good lines, but no pointless wisecracking. This Bond is serious. After all, he’s got his imitators to deal with — Tom Cruise and his Mission: Impossible franchise, Matt Damon as the disaffected CIA assassin Bourne, even a new line of teen-superspy movies kicking off this December with Stormbreaker. So, in Casino Royale we get a more conventional thriller, with the single most preposterous element being the idea that private yachts can sail up Venice’s Grand Canal. Overall, it’s pretty plausible, including the betrayals, and Craig makes a fine Bond.
The movie’s too long at two and a half hours, having an over-inflated sense of its own thrillingness, but it’s still the best Bond movie in ages. Craig can’t do irony like Connery could — he lacks the most cinematic eyebrows in history. But, for the first time since Connery, James Bond feels like he might actually be human — he even has a personality.
Casino Royale opens at cinemas countrywide on Friday December 1