The meticulously-turned phrase (it underwent several rewrites before Ian Fleming was satisfied) which opens the first James Bond novel sketches vividly the world in which the literary 007 operates.  It is a world where high living collides with the basest of human actions and motives, where the man in the sharpest suit is the toughest and most ruthless fighter, where the hero only earns his right to luxury by putting himself in mortal danger.  Readers who come to the Fleming books having hitherto seen only the films on which they are ostensibly based are often taken aback by just how visceral, sweaty, and bloody they are.  While Fleming self-deprecatingly described his books as adolescent pillow-fantasies, he understood, as all good fantasy writers do, that fantasy is at its most effective if conveyed in terms which communicate to readers on a physical level.  When Fleming's Bond gets hit, not only does he feel it, but Fleming makes sure that his readers feel it too.

Over the past forty-four years, EON productions' James Bond films, notwithstanding a handful of attempts to correct their course to match more closely that of Fleming's novels, became increasingly bloodless versions (both figuratively and literally) of what Fleming originally intended.  Bond gradually came to resemble a flippant gentleman sleuth of the Peter Wimsey variety than the 'blunt instrument wielded by government' described by Fleming.  For the filmic version of Bond to bleed, to sweat, to feel, to doubt, as he does in Fleming's books, had become increasingly rare, to the extent that for the majority of James Bond films released since 1971's Diamonds are Forever, fans of the literary Bond have had to feed on scraps, to learn to make do with maybe one or two frustratingly brief Flemingesque morsels in each film.

'Made you feel it, did he?'  These words are spoken by Bond's second victim as Bond earns his licence to kill in the noirish opening sequence of the latest James Bond film - the first in many years to be based substantially on Fleming material - Casino Royale.  As the scene flashes back to Bond's first, messy kill, a brutal knockdown fight in a public toilet, it's apparent that yes, Bond did 'feel it'.  For the first time in many years, so do we.

Like the movies' first James Bond, Sean Connery, and unlike most of the actors who have played the role since, new boy Daniel Craig conveys fully the adrenaline of Bond's fight scenes as Fleming described them.  Craig's physicality lends the movie an authority the Bond franchise hasn't had in years.  He brings such conviction to his role as an action hero that one can never quite believe that the actor even has a stunt double for the most dangerous moments, let alone that he would ever need to use one.  Yet as in Fleming's novels the action, while spectacular, has painful consequences.  After finishing off an opponent this Bond does not merely pat his hair back into place, straighten his tie, then deliver a mildly crass quip before swaggering off to his next rendezvous.  One scene in particular in Casino Royale captures Fleming's post-battle Bond perfectly, even though it doesn't originate from the novel: Bond, visibly shaken after dispatching an enemy, ripping his bloodied shirt off, cleaning his wounds, gratefully swallowing a glassful of whisky and then staring in numbed contemplation at his haggard reflection in a hotel-room mirror.

While the biggest action scenes in Casino Royale are as thrillingly implausible as ever, it's the absolute seriousness with which they're approached that sells them.  A chase scene which moves from a Madagascan shanty town to the top of a crane to the embassy of a fictional country is filmed with such a sense of the epic that it's impossible not to suspend disbelief.  Only a scene set in Venice toward the end of the film featuring a fight in a collapsing building seems tacked-on, a legacy of EON's historic reluctance to film Fleming's more anticlimactic endings.  (Even the classic Bond film From Russia with Love, which for the most part is faithful to Fleming's novel, adds two spectacular action scenes toward the end of the story to add some pizzazz to Fleming's muted conclusion.)

These scenes, written by Neil Purvis and Robert Wade and polished by Paul Haggis, the extent of whose contribution remains unclear, are not to be found in Fleming's novel, and nor is the film's other big set-piece, a memorable chase sequence which leads Bond from tailing a suspect through the unsettling Body Worlds exhibition to a dramatic showdown on the tarmac of Miami airport.  (Bond does a refreshing amount of actual spying during this film.)  However, the core of the film is a faithful adaptation of Fleming's short 1953 novel.  While the card game which formed the centre of the novel has been changed from Baccarat to the more déclassé and audience-friendly Texas Hold 'em Poker - and the hands dealt are as unlike anything one would see in real life as one might expect from what is still, after all, a fantasy movie - the flow of the novel is recreated with great care.  Even the novel's infamous torture scene remains intact, and what, as scripted, could have played out as a comic bowdlerization of Fleming's original vision is transformed by Daniel Craig's and Mads Mikkelsen's performances and Martin Campbell's direction into a sequence which is as teeth-clenchingly and leg-crossingly vivid as the original.

No post-Connery Bond in his debut performance has shrugged off comparisons to his predecessors as successfully as Craig does in Casino Royale: before the movie is even halfway through his Bond is far more his own man than those of Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan were by the end of their first Bond films.  When M derides Bond in GoldenEye as a 'sexist, misogynist dinosaur', we laugh not because of anything we have seen Bond do in the movie up to that point, but rather because of the accumulated knowledge we have of Bond from the previous sixteen films in the franchise.  By contrast, when Casino Royales M refers to Bond as a 'blunt instrument' - dialogue which in itself is an explicit statement of intent by the filmmakers - it feels like new information about a film character we are getting to know for the first time.

Daringly, Casino Royale saves the customary M and Bond exposition scene until over a third of the way into the film, so that the first two major action sequences of the film proper perform the functions normally fulfilled by the pre-credits sequence: to show Bond in action and to supply tantalizing hints of the central plot to come.  By the time we begin to see this Bond's more human side his tough-guy credentials, his methods, and his attitudes have been fully established.  Having reassured the audience that Craig can do all the things his predecessors did - daring stunts, tough hand-to-hand action, steely resolve, seductive charm, mild insolence to his superiors - the film then begins to dig deeper and to investigate areas of Bond's psyche which have been all but unexplored since the Fleming novels.

What Craig then delivers is nothing short of astonishing.  Where the previous movies had given us no more than a glimpse of the man behind the ironic mask, Craig brings to the character everything that Ian Fleming described - the self-doubt, the vulnerability, the romantic melancholy, the flashes of impetuous rage - and yet, as with Fleming's Bond, when it comes time for the 'hard', 'ironic' mask to be snapped back on, Craig becomes instantaneously the hard-nosed professional keeping his feelings firmly at bay.  No screen James Bond has ever come closer to portraying the man described at the end of Fleming's Casino Royale, a man feeling deep hurt who nevertheless, for the sake of his efficiency as a secret agent, forces himself to transform his grief into cold resolve.  What's more, no screen Bond has ever hinted more strongly at the spiritual cost of being able to do so.  In particular, there is a sense of tragedy in one key scene in the film which even the finale of On Her Majesty's Secret Service cannot come close to matching, not least because Bond is shown as having to deny his grief much too soon after the event.

Lest this might make it appear that Casino Royale is unremittingly grim, the film is in fact the most genuinely witty Bond for many years, and Craig shows a deftness in the lighter moments which even his most ardent supporters might find a surprise.  Bond and the lead female character Vesper Lynd's initial verbal sparring and sizing each other up (quite literally in Vesper's case) plays out with the panache of something from a Howard Hawks film, until one key moment of violence both shatters Vesper's frosty exterior and brings her and Bond closer together in a scene of surprising and very genuine tenderness.  Elsewhere, the skill with which the lighter moments are woven into the script shows up the leaden nature of certain previous Bond films where the corny payoff quip seemed to be the only form of verbal humour with which the writers could cope.  Here the humour is in an exasperated pause after a spat between Bond and Vesper over a dinner jacket, Bond's grim smile after the ingenious dispatch of one enemy, and, yes, in Bond's loaded retort to a question of Vesper's in a train scene which harks back as much to North by Northwest as it does to From Russia with Love.  For the most part it's delicious stuff, even if a cameo by Ludger Pistor as a swishy Swiss banker (try saying that when you're drunk) appears at times to be veering frighteningly close to territory previously mapped out by Rowan Atkinson's Small-Fawcett character in Never Say Never Again.  Even here, Craig's comic touch in the last scene he shares with Pistor saves it from becoming pure camp.

The film almost works as a love story as well, with only the residual memory from previous films of Bond as a serial womanizer making his falling so deeply for Vesper seem ever-so-slightly unconvincing.  Wisely, the filmmakers choose to build the relationship steadily and take more time over it than has ever been seen in a Bond film before.  Again, comparisons with OHMSS are inevitable, but in Casino Royale the relationship has more room to breathe and seems less arbitrary.

Apart from Craig's triumphant debut, the film boasts a number of fine performances.  This is the most interestingly cast EON film in many years, and refreshingly marks a return to the tradition of the early films in which the casts were drawn largely from European arthouse cinema rather than relying upon American star power.  The one American actor given a significant role, Jeffrey Wright as Bond's CIA colleague Felix Leiter, is given less to do than one might hope, but Wright nails the role with such sly wit that one can only hope this is a mere teaser for a more substantial role in future Bond films.  Giancarlo Giannini cuts an ironic, flirtatious figure as Bond's French ally Rene Mathis - has a supporting character in an EON film ever been truer to Fleming's original vision? - and Judi Dench's M, the one holdover from the Brosnan era, seems rejuvenated and far more engaged than she was in the curate's egg which was Die Another Day.

Despite her English accent being slightly less impressive than it had sounded in early interviews, Eva Green, like Diana Rigg and Sophie Marceau before her, manages to make something three-dimensional of the oft-derided role of the 'Bond girl'.  She's helped by a script which provides considerably more substance than one usually expects from such a part.  Green proves her mettle by handling some potentially difficult transitions with grace, and in a key pair of scenes - a vicious stairwell fight and Bond's comforting of Vesper fully clothed in a shower afterwards - she demonstrates acting chops to match Craig's.  Typical of the film's attention to detail, Green's reaction after entering a computer password during a scene late in the plot reveals a great deal more on second viewing than it does on the first: that it's subtle enough to appear inconspicuous the first time one sees it, yet telling enough to speak volumes the second time around, demonstrates a subtle shading to Green's performance which it's hard to imagine many Bond girls being able to match.

Mads Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre, while not matching the physical description of Fleming's Aleister Crowley-inspired original, is suitably creepy in every sense of the word.  Mikkelsen plays Le Chiffre as a gloating bully who is nevertheless reduced to a simpering wreck when called to account by his bosses.  His sadism is all the more frightening precisely because it's a weak man's attempt to make himself feel powerful, and the scene in which he tortures Bond gains extra bite because it's clear that Le Chiffre is so desperate that he will stop at nothing.

Above all, what makes this film stand out from the herds both of run-of-the-mill Bond films and cookie-cutter action movies is the care with which it's been made.  Martin Campbell, who has hitherto proved himself as the best kind of journeyman director, throws into the mix all manner of unexpected and subtle stylistic touches.  A fleeting glimpse of red fabric as Bond chases Vesper through Venice reminds one of the payoff scene of Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso (on re-watching it becomes apparent that the director really wasn't cheating and that the viewer missed a key detail the first time around).  An almost subliminal cut during Bond's second kill tells us something about his victim we might not have wanted to know, adding a troubling detail with which previous Bond films would never have concerned themselves.
 
Barbara Broccoli, co-producer of the Bond films with her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, has stated in interviews that she made Casino Royale for her father, Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli.  Certainly one feels Cubby would be proud, but Ms Broccoli has managed just as successfully to honour Ian Fleming as well.  While one wonders whether Fleming was ever the sort of person to give much of a damn about posterity, at least those who have felt somewhat let down by the dandification of his most famous creation will be heartened to see him brought back to the screen more faithfully than ever before - and somehow this adds an edge of unpredictability and danger to the character again.  Excitingly, Casino Royale is the first Bond film in decades to open up genuinely new possibilities for the franchise.  For the first time in many years the statement 'James Bond will return' does not sound like a promise that the next film will be comfortingly familiar: rather it suggests that there will be genuine surprises to come.  I, for one, can't wait.
 
Grade: A

Copyright © 2006 Phil Gerrard