Casino Royale

This is a first for this blog: an actual, first-run movie review. You see, the thing is, ticket prices are ridiculously expensive these days, and if there's a movie I'm only kind-of interested in seeing, I'm perfectly content to wait until Netflix, the wonder that it is, sends it to me wrapped in love and a waxed paper sleeve.

So unless there's something I really want to see, I don't go to the theater all that much. I dig the cheap theater with the second-run movies, but I live pretty far away from one, so that the convenience of checking out a flick is nil.

However, Casino Royale is something that I really wanted to see, and Amy agreed to seeing it, stating that she wouldn't mind seeing Daniel Craig shirtless. Whatever. He's attractive. I get it.

Anyways, I wanted to get my overall opinion in early, to convince you that it's worth the money.

You want to see this movie.

When the word broke that Daniel Craig would be the new Bond, I was all for it. I thought he was good in Road to Perdition and Layer Cake, and I could see what he could bring to the role. But a lot of people scoffed and threatened boycotts. Whether any of them made good on the threat is something I don't know, especially when the first trailers were released.

I was all for change because the series had started to become a joke unto itself. It became about a few stock items in each submission: the gadgets, the car, the chick. I noticed a while ago that the movies have to have the climax take place in the following places: underwater, in the air, or on land. This may seem obvious, but take a look back at the movies. You can predict what it's going to be 9 out of 10 times. In the beginning of Tomorrow Never Dies, a submarine gets sunk by a weird torpedo: this one's going to take place at sea. Moonraker: this one's obvious. No matter what the story, who the actor is, who the Bond Girl is, you knew what was going to happen. For a while, the producers considered opening up the franchise as a director showcase. What would John Woo's Bond be like? And exactly how much blood would be in Tarantino's Bond? It seemed like an interesting prospect.

But then, something else happened. In almost clear deference to Batman Begins, the solution to a stale, jokey franchise is to take it back to square one. And for those of you who don't know, Casino Royale is the very first Bond novel Ian Fleming ever wrote.

Okay. Enough about backstory - let's get to the movie. It's intense - the most intense in the series, in my opinion. We start out just as Bond gets his 00 status. He's a rookie, and it shows. He shows definite potential for the job, but he's a little sloppy and way too arrogant. He's put on his first mission and it goes wrong somewhere, which nearly leaves him out in the cold completely.

The first mission, while I won't deal out spoilers, is a great sequence. Craig lends a great physicality to the role that was missing from Brosnan's later entries and pretty much all of Roger Moore's leathery hide. I mean, seriously. He was like "Bond: Age 52."

Craig's physicality definitely shows in pretty much all of the action-oriented scenes. The cool thing is that, when the fights happen, there's no slow-motion, so everything goes amazingly quickly. Another neat thing is that, during all of the action-sequences, when Craig is doing all this chasing and fighting, while he's still a young scrapper, every now and again he shows some of the Bond intellect we are used to. For instance, while chasing a criminal that is climbing up a thin wire holding up a bunch of pipes on a construction site, instead of chasing him up the wire, Bond shoots the lever and is launched quickly upward. Also - don't have a lot of bullets but have a lot of people to shoot? Aim for something that blows up.

Something else I wanted to talk about is the music. We all know the Bond theme. It's a globally recognized series of notes. However, in this movie, we don't hear it but only a rare few times. It's really fun when he first puts on The Tuxedo, and the theme plays quietly with subtlety in the back. Also, a negative about the music. I hated the song. I'm not a Chris Cornell fan, and why he was chosen to write and perform the song is way beyond me. You'll know what I'm talking about when you see it.

As naturally occurs in movies that are based on old novels, some updating needs to take place. One of the things changed was the gambling. Instead of the obscure card game played in the original novel, they play Hold 'Em Poker. But, of course, this is allowed. After all, you wouldn't see Pinochle in a Western - you'd invariably see Five Card Stud.

However, as Bond himself has some weak moments, as does this movie. Somewhere in the second half of the movie, Bond mutters a really cheesy line. You'll know it when you hear it. And there's also the obligatory love story subsumed in there that feels, well, just obligatory. It's obvious that this was meant to be an action flick.

Beyond Craig himself, there are some really great performances. Eva Green plays the lovely Vesper Lynd, who is responsible for the money Bond is gambling with, and she lends a sweet vulnerability and naivety to the role. Mads Mikkelsen is disturbingly maniacal. There are physical bad guys and there are brainy bad guys. Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre is just quietly menacing.

A few funny moments happened in the theater while watching the movie. The first happened when the MI6 correspondence car first showed on screen. Amy and I heard about 50 guys climaxing. The opposite happened during the torture scene, when Amy and I heard just about every guy inhaling sharply in sympathetic pain. It was a little disturbing for a guy to watch, in their defense.

To put an end to this ridiculously long post, you must see this movie if you're a Bond fan (die-hard or moderate) or even if you just dig really great action movies. This one certainly breathes life into a franchise that was left asphyxiating (that's a hard word to spell) in mediocrity.