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Craig shakes up Bond role
CASINO ROYALE
Directed by Martin Campbell
Certificate 12A
SUPERB production values and great looking actors show that this latest James Bond adventure is a resounding victory for style over substance.
However, director Martin Campbell does his best to invest depth to a storyline which, written in 1953, is really just the usual spies, guns and girls yarn.
Daniel Craig (pictured) is excellent. His smooth manner pays homage to Sean Connery. The way he wears his suits and saunters about the place sipping from highball cocktail glasses and flipping casino chips is modelled on Connery.
Couple this with strong production values and you have a film that, despite the length, is entertaining.
But there is also a rather bizarre attempt to delve under the skin of Bond, to work out what made him into the killer he is.
Although this undoubtedly improves this film as a single entity, it is also annoying when you consider the franchise.
This heartfelt look at what made him into the killer he is ruins part of the fantasy. I have always tricked myself into thinking that James Bond does not exist. Instead it is a moniker given to a series of agents working for Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Hence you can have Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan all playing the same man.
But by going back, as this film does, to the early days before Bond was a Whitehall-paid killer, the illusion I have been carrying around with me has been shattered.
We see his first kill, an unpleasant moment which, it is suggested, had a deeper psychological impact on Bond than we realise.
Bond, shell-shocked? Who would have thought it?
Top baddie this time round has none of the megalomaniac tendencies that usually define a Bond enemy. Called Le Chiffre, he is a banker who happens to be in charge of funds for some of the world’s leading terrorists.
He is aiming to raise some serious cash in a poker game at the Casino Royale in Montenegro – and Bond is drafted in to stop him doing it.
Bond is joined by Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) who works for the treasury and whose job it is to watch over Bond’s pocket money and provide some flirtatious banter which gets more intense as Le Chiffre’s gang try to scupper their game.
It is not a bad Bond – there have been many worse. But it is still a Bond film, which means we have seen it before. Twenty-one times, to be precise.
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