Apologies to Rene Magritte, but this is not James Bond.  Yes, it's the 21st "official" entry into the James Bond series, or as it's sadly come to be known, the franchise, where movies are flame-broiled, pickled, bunned and tossed into the microwave like so many Big-Mac-brand-sandwiches.  We come to a movie franchise because we know what to expect.  At a McDonalds we expect a clean place to sit, 63.2 tall salty French-fries in a "large" order of the stuff, and a coterie of polite, zit-covered teens scrambling to fulfill our order of trans-fats and glucose.  And in general, we knew what to expect from a James Bond film: a gun-barrel trademark, two gadgets, one pre-credit sequence, one disfigured foreign villain, at least two good chases, some terrible one-liners that your father would be embarrassed to tell at the dinner table, some bon vivance and a lot of implied sex and one huge production number where the action goes all out, punctuated with the blaring horns of a song that used to be the theme to an unproduced calypso musical based on V.S. Naipul.  And all of these things are in the new James Bond picture, Casino Royale.  But they're in such a strange order, done with such a confidence that each moment of the story was surprising, electric, and made for what is probably the best James Bond picture ever made.

There have been 23 films with Mr. Bond as the main character.  And with this production, the novel of Casino Royale has been "treated" to three productions.   So we know what we're going to get, right? Wrong - this Bond film has almost every trademark of the Bond franchise, but it's stripped down and reordered - like Bond's Bentley: a museum piece, but with a supercharger.  And it thrills in a way I haven't felt in a very long time.

The film starts with what the film folks call a "cold open."  Really cold.  It's winter in Prague, and the first thing we see is a office building, just an office building.  But it's the wrong angle, we're at foot-level.  There's nothing romantic about this building, nothing romantic about where we are.  Some guy takes an elevator, and the numbers start going up… four, five… And you start thinking to yourself "I know where this is going."  Anyone who's seen a James Bond film knows that the elevator is going to stop on floor seven.  Get it?  The bomb in Goldfinger stopped at 0-0-7, right?  So we're going to get a little—wait, he's gotten off at six.  And hey, this is in black and white!  And hey, where's my gunbarrel sequence?  Oh, THERE it is.  We've gotten what we expect, but not how we expect it.  Convention is there, but it's been turned on its head and by both using and subverting cliché, the film becomes both surprising and inevitable.

After a stylishly retro and modern credit sequence replete with card suits resembling everything from bullets to Mandelbrot expression graphs, we are transported to Africa, where we get a thrilling chase through a construction site.  The chase, though, is not just a chase – it reveals character.  While the target (a gloriously nimble Sebastien Foucan) glides effortlessly over a wall, Bond prefers to smash through the drywall, giving us none of the élan we've come to know from our Bond.  We learn that this Bond will stop at nothing, but that he can be stopped.  Countless times the action is choreographed so we can feel Bond's pain.  And we also learn that he's a quick thinker who will kill if he has to, but would prefer that he doesn't.  The chase was breathtaking, and quite possibly the most exciting chase sequence in the Bond series – a chase on foot!

After another chase sequence, some near-seduction, and some lovely adversarial moments with M, suddenly things get even more exciting – the movie sits down for a while.  In choreographing a card game that's at least as exciting as the foot chase, Martin Campbell has shown that he could directed a staring contest and make it fun.  

The movie's long and strong (forgive me) suits are the actors.  Mads Mikkelsen and Daniel Craig are compelling.  Mikkelsen is the more classically handsome of the two, but Craig's face is interesting to watch.  He gives little away, but lets the audience know that he's thinking.  He's the most intense and intensely private performer I've seen for some time.  And he's quick.  When he makes a decision, he moves quickly, nimbly aided by Stuart Baird, the editor.  You can see Craig think, which is the hallmark of any great film actor.  His moment-to-moment work is terrific – the lines he says seem to be lines he thinks of, and he reacts honestly and simply.  On a scene in a European train, he silently and subtly shows us how impressed he is with Eva Green's character, Vesper Lynd.  Ms. Green is also a fine choice.  She has something of a tomboyish face, despite her svelte but curvaceous body, so she doesn't look rebuilt like the Hollywood robo-babes we've come to expect out of our Nuclear Physicists

The script follows in large part the novel of the same name.  Yes, the game is changed; it's no longer baccarat.  I, for one, am glad.  In poker, it's a game of wills.  Baccarat, for those who know the game, is entirely a game of luck.  No amount of staring into the cold eyes of LeChiffre are going to change your pair of cards from a monkey to a natural.  However, the right stare can make your opponent fold – in poker.  But the real genius is in how the script is structured.  Purvis, Wade and Haggis (sounds like a blue plate special at a Scottish restaurant) have given us an upside-down Bond script.  While most Bond scripts start small and end unconscionably large, with various nuclear plant explosions, two or three brigades of the US Army and Royal Marines bursting through countless hollowed out volcanoes, Casino Royale has the temerity to end small, centering on the feelings of one James Bond, with one bullet to the knee-cap and an introduction that usually comes at the beginning of each film.

Do I have any complaints about the script?  One: the romance is overwritten.  I understand what they were trying to do, to give it a retro flavor of Hitchcock, but some of the dialogue sounded more like Noel Coward. One wonders if the screenwriters went to Jamaica for their research and went to the wrong house.  But the encounter must have been brief, since it's a small part of the picture and doesn't hold up the pace, which is breathtaking.

What's frustrating about the over-written romance is that Craig doesn't need it.  Daniel Craig shines brighter than any actor in the series.  I said it: he's better than Connery.  Connery, for all his swagger and cruelty, kept people at a distance.  He never seemed to feel comfortable letting us inside his soul.  Sure, he'd let us in on a joke occasionally, but never inside the mind.  Craig lets us inside Bond's armor, even when his armor is up. Craig is also good at comedy, which most reviewers haven't noticed.  While racing in a car towards the casino, he shares a touching and comic scene with Eva Green which is played for laughs, for character and for romance.  And it works on all three levels, as does the film.  Bond doesn't need to talk as much as he does in some of the romantic bits.  He says everything he needs to with his eyes.

We're given a film that's Flemingesque in spirit, breathtaking in execution, and combines the best elements of the films with the best elements of the books, in an order that constantly surprises us.  Does it contain everything we've come to expect?  No, the gadgets are a little tamer, a little more down-to-earth.  And Miss Moneypenny's nowhere to be seen, apart from a quick allusion in the train sequence.  Do I miss the gadgets? The flirtation with M's personal assistant?  No, not really.  Because I know they will, like James Bond, return.  

This film is probably the best in the series, and a very fine film in its own right – it deserves an A.

Copyright © 2006 Jerem Kareken