He has furrows in his brow, bags under his eyes and scars all over the shop his Bond never lets you forget that international espionage, and particularly the business of killing for one's country, is dirty work. Craig's predecessor Pierce Brosnan, a good Bond undermined by below-par material, scrubbed up rather too well for the role. The first thing to say about Casino Royale is that Daniel Craig is, contra all those nay-sayers, one of its strengths: his performance is the closest we get to a rethink of the character. (Or just someone capable of bringing these modern-day Bonds in under two hours and twenty minutes much of Casino Royale is spent plodding around the globe in pursuit of people for Bond to chase.) For years now, Quentin Tarantino has been pestering MGM to let him direct a Bond movie, and - even as someone ambivalent towards Tarantino - I have to ask: how cowardly a film producer do you have to be to turn down Tarantino in favour of the man behind The Legend of Zorro?

What this solid, mostly uninspired entry offers is more proof that as far as the Bond movies are concerned, the man in the tuxedo is far less important than the tuxedo (or the institution of Bond) itself.ĭouble-O-phobes and Bond-sceptics will be left with the usual thoughts: that a truly radical overhaul of this series would require new producers (Bond has always had Broccoli in his teeth, or perhaps it's the other way round), a serious rethink of the character, and a director with a personality to impose upon this most rigid of movie frameworks.

For all the talk of the James Bond franchise going back to basics with Casino Royale - returning to Ian Fleming's first 007 book, previously filmed in 1967 for a joke casting Daniel Craig as a much tougher breed of secret agent - it was unlikely to abandon the formula that has raked in so much money over the years. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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