James Bond Begins
'Casino Royale' takes 007 back to his roots
By Andy Klein
The bad news is: Daniel Craig is no Sean Connery. The good news is: He's not supposed to be.
The better news is: By reinventing their main character, the producers of the James Bond series have revitalized the longest-running international film franchise, which has more than once descended into silliness and irrelevance.
Nine years ago, reviewing Tomorrow Never Dies, the second Pierce Brosnan entry, I wrote that "it's caper ... chase ... murder ... sex ... chase ... murder ... caper ... chase ... and so on, until the finale, where, rather predictably, Bond and Wai Lin have to collaborate to save the world. It would be silly to expect anything
startlingly new from the venerable series at this stage of the game. Ever since Goldfinger set the pattern that has guided the series, the individual films have risen or fallen on the quality of the leading man and the cleverness of the execution."
But Casino Royale is startlingly new ... and, in another sense, startlingly not new. That is to say, what the filmmakers have done is analogous to what Christopher Nolan did last year in Batman Begins: They've gone back to the original material and updated it, while restoring elements of character and tone that had been largely avoided in the earlier adaptations.
Casino Royale was the book in which Ian Fleming created Bond, mixing his own memories of intelligence work during the war with fantasies of being, essentially, the coolest dude in the world. The original 007 is a much grimmer, colder character than the wisecracking sophisticate Sean Connery played (much less the Roger Moore version). What is perhaps the book's best known line seems like a knockoff of the ending of I the Jury, the first of Mickey Spillane's hugely popular novels about antihero Mike Hammer.
Dr. No, the first Bond movie, was made by Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman's Eon Productions, which secured the rights to all the books except the already purchased Casino Royale. (For various legal reasons not worth going into here, the company later lost control of the rights to Thunderball.) Accordingly, all the James Bond films have come from Broccoli/Saltzman and their successors ... except for two earlier versions of Casino Royale, and Never Say Never Again, a second adaptation of Thunderball. A few years ago, Eon finally cleared the rights to make a version of the one Fleming novel they had missed. Given the quality of the earlier Casino Royales, it's a welcome development.
The story was initially produced as a live 1954 TV drama for the series Climax! Presumably to accommodate the casting of Barry Nelson, Bond was turned into an American, working for the "Combined Intelligence Agency," while American Felix Leiter was transformed into British agent Clarence Leiter (though the sloppy credits have the name as "Letter"). The villain, Le Chiffre, will not be remembered as one of Peter Lorre's finest moments. While fairly faithful to the book's plot, this version is pretty awful and only interesting as a sample of live TV drama, despite the teleplay being credited to "Charles Bennet" - presumably meaning Charles Bennett, who wrote many of Hitchcock's greatest British films. (I highly recommend Amanda Wells's detailed and witty descriptive review at Agonybooth.com/agonizer/article.asp?Id=casino-royale-1954.)
That version (minus a minute or so of the ending) is available as an extra on the DVD of the better known 1967 "psychedelic" "comedy," which preserved little of the book except the title and the central card game. Yet another great actor, Orson Welles, turns in a lackluster performance as Le Chiffre.
The new Casino Royale maintains the Eon tradition of a precredit adventure sequence not directly related to the main plot. In this case, it's a black-and-white presentation of Bond's second hit (intercut with his first) - the deed that qualifies him for promotion to the cherished double-0 status.
After the latest incarnation of the classic Bond bull's-eye motif, there is the first big action set piece - in which Bond chases a potential suicide bomber (Sebastien Foucan) on foot; Foucan is one of the original proponents of Parkour, the martial-arts/acrobatic concept at the center of District B13, one of this year's most entertaining films. It's a great bit, and this highlighting of Parkour proves that the Bond people are hip to recent developments in action cinema.
By frustrating the bomber, Bond puts Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) in a bad position. Our villain is reimagined here as an off-the-books investment broker for ruthless, murderous "clients," who expect absolute reliability ... or else. His investment strategy is to assure that disasters befall companies that he has shorted: i.e., selling United and American Airlines stock short on September 10 (to use the film's own analogy). After Bond foils a second such scheme, Le Chiffre has only one way to recoup his losses and save his skin: a high-stakes game of Texas Hold 'Em at the posh titular casino.
In the book and the earlier films, the game was baccarat, which is deadly dull on screen (and not so swift in real life). The switch to Texas Hold 'Em helps considerably, since the game involves a degree of psychology, whereas baccarat is close to sheer luck.
But the more substantive changes involve the whole tone of the enterprise and the nature of Bond himself. Although Craig is a fine actor, I was one of the many to be hugely disappointed when Eon cast him rather than Clive Owen or Hugh Jackman. Craig may be handsome in an odd, sometimes almost simian way, and he's by far the buffest Bond ever, but there is something a little creepy about him; and he has cold, cold eyes. (His breakthrough American part, in Road to Perdition, exploited this.)
As Bond has been reconceived, he's perfect. Timothy Dalton's two Bond entries were attempts at a more "serious" Bond, after the Roger Moore films had become increasingly facile and ludicrous. But Craig's Bond goes beyond being serious: It's not just that he makes (at most) two wisecracks in the entire film; it's that he's a sociopath, emotionally controlled to the point of being kinda scary. One overlong scene of verbal dueling between Bond and lover-to-be Vesper (Eva Green) includes some very clever intimations about his personality.
The action scenes are great; Craig makes a very interesting hero; the plot is generally logical. So what could be wrong?
Well, the one real problem here is the dramatic structure (and the length it demands). Bond films - like most action films - have a certain rhythm. In this case, the story reaches what feels like the end ... then goes on for another 20 or 25 minutes in order to set up one more reversal (making for a total running time a tad short of two and a half hours). Director Martin Campbell stretches out the set-up, as though lulling us will make the final surprise more of a shock. But, of course, we know it's coming: It's not like we expect the film to end with 20 minutes of an uneventful idyll. No matter how good the action is in this capper, it still feels like the fourth act of a three-act play. Goldfinger has a similar post-climax climax, but it's about three minutes long.
This is also the first of the Casino Royales to preserve the book's grueling torture scene, in which Bond is tied naked to a chair from which most of the seat has been removed, while Le Chiffre whips our hero's dangling naughty bits. How the MPAA allowed this through with a PG-13 is anyone's guess.
Published: 11/16/2006
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