BOND REBORN Review by Scott Weitz Rating: November 17, 2006 Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli did what few Hollywood producers ever do: take a risk, and a big one.   For the 21st installment of the popular and prolific film series, they returned to the franchise character's origins and took a calculated gamble.  Their mission: reboot James Bond.  Based quite faithfully on novelist Ian Fleming's first Bond adventure, CASINO ROYALE strips Bond of the cluttered gadgetry which had bloated the franchise and rebuilds the character from the ground up.  The resulting film allows Bond's humanity to arise out of a gritty, blood-stained world of painful realism, restoring danger and uncertainty to the filmgoing experience which will likely catch many casual Bond fans off guard.  Daniel Craig delivers a more cunning and ruthless Bond audiences have not seen the like of in decades, and his powerful work here resets the clock on both the role and the franchise.  Reset.  Restart.  Return to a challenging, dangerous world in which possessing a double-0 license to kill is also an invitation to die in completing an MI6 assignment.  Fortunately the creative team of CASINO ROYALE has succeeded in their mission to reinvigorate Bond the character and the series.

About CASINO ROYALE, a catch phrase leaps to mind: this isn't your father's James Bond.  Yet, depending on your age, this new film delivers a James Bond much more like the one born in your father's era, and bearing little resemblance to ultra-suave, modern era Martini swiller whose assignments are as smoothly executed as his designer suits.  Daniel Craig's incarnation of 007 sheds the fantasy glamour of spying and redresses Bond in facial lacerations, skinned knuckles and heart-stopping mortal danger.   One line in the film sums up this transforming revelation: in the height of Bond's life-or-death gamble, a bartender asks if he wants his martini shaken or stirred and Bond replies, dry as vermouth, "Do I look like I give a damn?"

Message received from director Martin Campbell and scribes Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis: this new Bond is a lethal-edged blade, not a crisply pressed lapel on a tux.  The only style points Craig's Bond cares about is completing his mission with fewer injuries to his battered body; the only punchline worth delivering lands on the jaw of his opponent.

Taking a cue from Bond author and creator, Ian Fleming, Wilson and Broccoli return to the spy's genesis in the first novel, as CASINO ROYALE resets 007 to 000, but quickly accelerates the character and story into action in a brief, brutal prologue showing Bond make his first two kills to gain his double-0 status.  Bond is soon on his first undercover mission in Uganda, disrupting an arms dealer linked to an international terrorist banking plot.  In just a few minutes, the script and direction allow actor Daniel Craig to forge his new Bond in a hard-hitting, fierce agent with singular focus on mission results.

I can't describe the action of this opening set piece as stunning, if only because it wasn't designed as the typical, stunt showcase designed for cinematic spectacle.  Instead this sequence illustrates the new Bond's athletic physicality harnessed by a relentless determination to complete his task.  Bond doesn't jump off jungle compound walls or fling himself off a construction crane because the filmmakers are trying to top the prior film's death-defying gag; Bond takes this insane leap because he's chasing an irrational foe desperate to avoid capture, and if Bond doesn't leap, Bond fails. 

Daniel Craig got a lot of flack from unyielding, unreasonable Bond fans for taking on the role, since his blond, rugged looks didn't fit the dark-haired debonair playboy image nurtured and eventually abused in the film series.  Wisely Craig did what any actor worth his salt and SAG card should do: he simply acts the hell out of the role, and challenges anyone not to appreciate how he can skillfully bring dry wit, buffed physicality and sheer chutzpah to playing his Bond his way.  Of course, Craig's success as Bond comes as no surprise to anyone who saw and appreciated his work in films like LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS or LAYER CAKE, where he proved he could match action with character with enjoyable, likable results.  Now Craig takes a giant leap forward in his film career, and I expect audiences will enjoy the challenge he offers taking Bond in this new direction.

Indeed changes abound as Bond returns from his first assignment to confront an equally reimagined MI6 run by the same M (Judi Dench) who nonetheless also bears a new attitude.  While Dench has made a very intriguing post-modern M in the Brosnan-era of films, she and Bond got too comfortable with each other to truly replicate their relationship as first established by Fleming.  M often scolded Bond for his lingering Cold War absolutism and disciplinary impudence, but the scripts sapped M of the character's true authority over Bond and the double-0 program: they became too chummy and personal for the film series' own good. 

In sharp contrast, CASINO ROYALE finds M chewing out Bond for his explosive handling of the Uganda assignment, and quickly regrets promoting this "blunt instrument" to double-0 status too soon.  While its the same actress in the part, Dench's dialogue and acting chops quickly erase years of Bond baggage in a film which basically asks audiences to forget the Bond they knew, just as Dench's M apparently has.  This may be rather shocking to longtime fans of Bond cinema who have followed the films through 20 installments and five other actors in the role, but such a franchise reboot is absolutely necessary if the films are to continue with any purpose beyond living off the franchise's reputation.

Truly all bets are off now, and that's exactly where the filmmakers have begun their bold gamble: at the beginning, with the first Fleming tale, in CASINO ROYALE.  For those devotees of Bond films who have seen and either enjoyed or despised to two earlier adaptations of this Bond genesis story, rest assured the 2006 film bears no resemblance to either predecessor.  A rarely-seen 1954 American television production of CASINO ROYALE starred Barry Nelson as Bond, and had little in common with the Bond film audiences would meet a decade later in Sean Connery.  The novel's rights since became unavailable to Albert Broccoli's Eon Productions, which is why the story and title never appeared in the Bond film series for over four decades.  In the mid-60s after Connery implied he was through playing 007, an outside production deal turned CASINO ROYALE into the 1967 psychedelic spoof of Bond, starring Peter Sellers, David Niven and a cast of dozens in a bizarre, disjointed tale helmed by multiple directors.  This counterculture twist on Bond also had little in common with Fleming's novel beyond the basic plot line of James facing off at baccarat with the villain Le Chiffre over stolen funds.

In a brilliant stroke which hammers home the concept of Bond reborn, Eon Productions finally gained the rights to Fleming's first novel and have adapted it quite faithfully in both plot, tone and intent.   Le Chiffre at last appears on screen in the guise of actor Mads Mikkelsen, whose role and talents also sap the Bond villain of its tired melodrama and rhapsodic odes to evildoing.  Don't get me wrong, I delight in Goldfinger's deliciously dubbed monologue as he's about to dissect 007 with a laser!  But the era of Super Villain has passed, and today's world is threatened by more mundane, less poetic but no less desperate destroyers, and Mikkelsen's creepy yet disciplined performance embodies this 21st century paradigm.  Even with his blood-tearing eye and facial scars, Le Chiffre is at heart a caged rat, rabid in his ruthless masochism rather than foaming at the mouth and chewing up the scenery.   Bond receives punishment not because Le Chiffre is his sworn enemy, but merely because 007 stands in his way of regaining the money Le Chiffre needs to save his own neck.  The flipside of this new Bond, Le Chiffre is a practical villain, and his torture scene (see audiences squirming in a theater near you!) illustrates that such practical threats are far more terrifying and lethal than monologuing maniacs of years gone by.

This new start only gets better: meet the Bond Women, for they can no longer be called Bond Girls.  Key to this very welcome transformation in the film series is the lovely, beautifully beguiling Vesper Lynd, played by Eva Green.  As in the original novel, Vesper is a complex and complicated woman who both puzzles and entices Bond to emerge from his chilly personal comfort zone.  While thrown into working with Bond as a professional, she is not merely a repressed government functionary waiting to be liberated off her heels and into his bed to rediscover her feminine desires.  As Bond and Lynd first meet on a European bullet train, Vesper and James take turns sizing each other up, dueling with their razor-sharp wits and keen insight as professional data miners, with both concluding the other has serious psychological baggage neither welcome.  While Vesper may admit she noticed Bond's "perfectly formed ass," she correctly determines he's a great risk to losing the $10 million in government funds she's forced to give Bond as his gambling buy-in to defeat Le Chiffre.

As Solange, wife of a suspected terrorist funding partner of Le Chiffre, Caterina Murino ably fills in the blanks about this new Bond's attitude toward women, as inspired from the novel: Bond loves the pleasure of women, but despises the professional complications that accompany them.  Bond may well seduce Solange to gain information on her husband's dealings, but his sexual appetite is counterbalanced dramatically by his personal revelation that he appreciates her unavailability as a married woman.  Solange complies for this same reason, as Bond delivers what she wants with the same no-strings guarantee.  Indeed, this delving into Bond's psyche sets up his eventual complications working with the alluring Vesper Lynd, as Bond rebukes that she's not his type because she's single.  Of course Bond will have to confront his own personal demons in this matter as he and Vesper grow closer during their assignment, and happily the script endows Vesper with emotional complexity to challenge both Bond and his audience's stereotyped expectations of who exactly a Bond woman can and should be.

Eva Green's work in the role is perhaps as crucial to the film's success as Daniel Craig's efforts, since Vesper exists in the story to put James— not Bond — in personal jeopardy as a man whose solitary, lethal efficiency may soon cost him his humanity.  Both Caterina Murino and Green are very easy on the eyes in their glamorous stylings, but Eva takes full advantage of scenes with Bond where her guard is down, and before the makeup and the hairdo are in place, she radiates inner simple beauty and vulnerability which can't help but attract both Bond and the audience to her.   With a more mature, realistic Bond arrives strong, adult women who act, think and behave far beyond the negligee-draped playthings of yesteryear. 

All these updated elements support a script and story which are blessedly short on high-tech gizmos invented sheerly out of a screenwriter's necessity, and instead filled with gritty action in which kicks crack ribs, knuckles cut skin, and chasing suspects at full speed sucks the wind out of you.  Of course the action remains dramatically heightened to keep it exciting, but fights for the causes of good or bad are fought between individuals, not nameless henchmen served up as battle fodder for the camera.  The opening hand-to-hand combat in a men's room is brutally violent and ugly, just like a real fight would be.  A later ambush in a stairwell causes the victor nearly as much damage as the loser, since concrete walls and iron railings do not cushion collisions for heroes only.  If the audience can set down expectations from 20 prior films, they will quickly enjoy the controlling maxim in CASINO ROYALE that less is, in fact, more; that fantasy may provide a great sugar rush of thrills, but realistic drama and torturous peril make a much more satisfying meal in the modern world of espionage.  Credit to writers Purvis, Wade and Haggis for updating the original Fleming novel without sacrificing its earnest simplicity.

So many of these gambles could have been played the wrong way in lesser hands with less caring hearts, but director Martin Campbell's strategy to reimagine Bond from square one, yet more closely to how Fleming imagined him from the start.  While the film takes roughly an hour to arrive at Casino Royale for the faceoff between Bond and Le Chiffre, it never lags or sags under the dramatic dead-weight of the obligatory opening sequence or the new assignment expository chunk which audiences not only expect but could easily time on their watches even in the dark by now.  If there's a single key to CASINO ROYALE's success as opening a new era in Bond films, its the deliberate defeating of audience expectation established — and often lazily relied upon — as the franchise grew long in the tooth and short on original Fleming stories.

No Moneypenny, no Q . . . well, not yet anyway, as per Fleming's novel.   We do meet Felix Leiter in the form of actor Jeffrey Wright, who ably fills his minor plot functions here but will be welcome in future films as Daniel Craig's CIA counterpart.  But we are spared jetpacks and in-car missile launchers — heck Bond isn't even issued a high-end luxury car, he has to win one at the poker tables!  Just as the filmmakers have reset and rebooted Bond, so too should the audience erase their timeworn expectations and discover the true origins of James Bond 007.

The film is not without some minor flaws amid such an ambitious, risky undertaking: at nearly two-and-a-half hours running time, the film avoid true slow spots but it does tend to sprawl a bit longer than it might have; but at the same time, there are seemingly unmistakable moments where scenes from a longer cut were edited which produced somewhat jarring jumps in story time.  In both instances, I give earned credit to the filmmakers for erring on the side of developing this new Bond's character and style of storytelling, rather than feeding the audience an uninterrupted stream of action sequences as mere eye candy.  One true disappointment actually begins the film, as Chris Cornell's opening song "You Know My Name" is utterly uninspiring as either a torch bearer for great Bond songs of the past or as a new beginning for title sequence tunes.  Minor issues which combined can't come close to derailing this major success story.

CASINO ROYALE may not be the next Bond film fans were waiting for, but it's certainly a new and welcome start that a popular and beloved film franchise deserves.  Not unlike Christopher Nolan's excellent reclamation of the Batman franchise with BATMAN BEGINS, the producers, director and writers of CASINO ROYALE have opened a new chapter — fittingly the first chapter — in the continuing saga of James Bond 007.  Perhaps the highest compliment which can be paid to these filmmakers is that, like the aforementioned film, this new beginning's ultimate results is to leave the audience wanting more.  Bond is reborn, and due to CASINO ROYALE, long may he continue to live.