So we caught Bond’s latest outing, the Bond Begins Casino Royale, showing us for the first time, the genesis of a super-agent.
The first Bond film to sport a Fleming title since The Living Daylights, we see Bond at the start of his 007 career, taking on the terrorists and their banker, the villainous Le Chiffre. Facing him with guns and a poker hand, the film is a heady mix of non-stop action and tense poker faces, combined with some top class Bond girls, a couple of Aston Martins and some neat one liners.
It’s a very different Bond film from previous efforts. Gone are Q branch and their wonderful gadgets. Gone is the Bond swagger and the bulletproof superspy. Bond gets well and truly beaten several times and the baddies are far more brutal than the comic book Blofeld types.
And to complement this new style, Daniel Craig puts in an excellent turn as the rough around the edges Bond - brutal, deadly and with a chip on his shoulder the size of an Aston Martin. I look forward to seeing where he takes Bond in the next movie, as he becomes more of the spy we know and love.
All in all it’s a good movie, with some of the best action sequences that I’ve seen in a movie for some time. This is also coupled for some nice dialogue scenes - Bond’s head to head with Vesper is great, and even the poker scenes are soaked in tension. For me, the only thing that lets the movie down is an overly long and badly paced third act, which brings the movie rating from great to very good. Still, worth seeing for the set pieces alone, though be careful if you suffer from vertigo.
Bond is back and on the strength of this, he will be around for a while.
