Review : Casino Royale (2006)

Casino Royale : Armed with a licence to kill, Daniel Craig sets out on his first mission as 007 to defeat a weapons dealer in a high stakes game of poker at Casino Royale, but things are never what they seem.

I remeber watching this back on the big screen in 2006, I can remember Daniel Craig  showing himself  to be fully capable of taking on a British icon. James Bond. A man of cool, cruel determination, mesmerising sex appeal and a fatally destructive way with women. There have been several different Bonds over the last 50 Years. You can tell throughout the whole film, Craig is Bond. You don't question it, he has taken on the mantle of 007, and the result is a death-defying, sportscar-driving, female-back-fondling, cocktail-recipe-specifying triumph. Daniel Craig is a fantastic Bond, personally my favourite out of all the Bonds so far.

Craig was inspired casting. He has an effortless presence and lethal danger; he doesn't need to act like Bond, to be Bond, he's just got it. He brings a serious actor's ability to a fundamentally unserious part; he brings out the playfulness and the absurdity, yet never sends it up. He's easily the best Bond since Sean Connery, with Craig's unsmiling demeanour and his unfashionably, even faintly un-British dirty blond hair, he looks like a cross between the Robert Shaw who grappled with Bond in 'From Russia With Love.

This is the story of James Bond's beginning, transferred forward in time to a loosely imagined post-9/11 present. After a very nasty and violent killing in a men's room, shot in grainy monochrome, Bond earns his official double-0 rating with a second wet job: the unofficial whacking of a traitor in the higher reaches of MI6.

His spurs earned, Bond must now tackle his first super-villain: Le Chiffre, banker to Smersh in the original, now accountant and financier to international terrorists everywhere, though al-Qaida and anyone else from the Middle East are coyly left unmentioned. M even implies that manipulating airline stock prices was a motivating factor for 9/11 - a sly piece of cynicism that would have amused Fleming himself.

Casino Royale is what I find to be a very enjoyable film indeed, If you can ignore the smirking and the quips and the gadgets that have been cut back - and the emotion and wholesome sado-masochism that has been pumped up, I think you'll enjoy this if you're willing to shrug off those detracting factors.

Another contributing factor which I'm sure most Bond fans may have noticed, is that the Barry theme tune is saved for the closing credits. So that just proves, watch it all through to the end, or you'll miss something.

Thoughts Overall, Mr Craig brings off cinema's most preposterous role with insouciant grit: I hope he doesn't quit too soon. I'd like see the next few films tackle 007's off-duty life more: his hangovers, his money worries. Daniel Craig could make it work. He has more to give, even now he's done three Bond films, I think he has potential in the role and continues to make it good. 8/10

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