Director: Martin Campbell
Cast: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright
Have I Seen It Before?: I had been aching for a proper adaptation of Fleming’s first novel ever since reading it. The multi-director comedy-adjacent Casino Royale (1967) need not be mentioned here.
Did I like it?: And so one might normally be unable to get over what the film could have been. An EON-produced version in the 60s starring Sean Connery, with Audrey Hepburn as Vesper Lynd and Orson Welles as Le Chiffre (the 1967 did get one thing right) would have been glorious. The rumored efforts of Quentin Tarantino trying to launch an all black-and-white version with Pierce Brosnan (and presumably Uma Thurman as Lynd, with maybe Samuel L. Jackson as Le Chiffre?) would have been bananas and also one of my favorite films of all time.
So, it is a testament to the glories of this film that I like it so much despite what it could have been. The book is surprisingly faithful to the source material. One might scratch their head at the notion of turning The Big Game from Baccarat to Texas Hold’em Poker, but if anyone watching any of the previous Bond pictures claims they understood how the game of Baccarat works, they’re lying. After years of steeping myself in Bondanalia, all I’ve been able to absorb is the fact that it merges the most frustrating elements of both Craps and Blackjack. How hard is it to hit the number nine?
And yet it keeps enough of the Bond movie trappings to be that particular cinematic flavor one can only find in the Bond series. David Arnold’s score is resurrecting the best of John Barry, the extension to the plot make the adventure not nearly as claustrophobic as Fleming’s story kept matters. One might miss the initial gun-barrel sequence, before one realizes that the entire pre-credit sequence is the origin of the gun barrel itself. The film series has been notorious for playing things safe, but here, every risk pays off. I just don’t understand anyone who thinks things have changed too much or that Bond has become too much like the Bourne series.
As with the initial outing for all of the Bonds, one must take a moment to ascertain the qualities of the man himself. Every Bond with the possible exception of Connery make their strongest outing their first. There was a lot of skepticism from the public about Craig, mostly having to do with his flaxen hair. Here, he is more than equal to the task of taking on the 007 mantle, and with a quality far closer to the Fleming original in ways that were accepted by the public, when only twenty years earlier were scoffed at when brought to life by Timothy Dalton. As I write this review we are—depending on the behavior of a pandemic or two—approaching the end of Craig’s tenure, it’s sort of amazing that the weak links in the chain of his time at the wheel of the Aston Martin would have been considered the best films of many of the other Bonds. He is the second coming of Connery for which many Bond fans were always hoping, and I sit here anxiously awaiting No Time To Die (2020) and wondering how the series will recover from his loss.