| Summary: |
The James Bond films carry certain expectations: guns, cars, gadgets, martinis shaken, not stirred, girls, sex, and cringe-worthy double entendres are chief among them. Casino Royale is astonishing in its defiance of some of those conventions. But this film isn’t the balm to soothe the wounds of a decade’s worth of poor filmmaking.
The twenty-first Bond film in the 44-year-old film franchise, released November 17, ushers in a new Bond (Daniel Craig) and an apparent new direction for the series. Bond is a more three-dimensional character, and he’s made relevant for the times, a quality desperately lacking in the last four films.
After an overlong, almost utterly meaningless first hour, Bond is put on the trail of Le Chiffre (Mads Mikklesen), the terrorist group’s money man. Le Chiffre has just lost a lot of bad people’s money in the stock market, and to get it back he enters a high-stakes poker tournament at the Casino Royale. M (Judi Dench) gets Bond in the game — apparently Bond is MI6’s ace cards man — in order to prevent Le Chiffre from winning back what he lost, then bring him in for interrogation.
Casino Royale , the first Bond book written by Ian Fleming, is the last Fleming Bond text to be adapted, straight, cinematically. In 1967, a madcap spy spoof adaptation of Casino Royale starring Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and Orson Welles, among others, was made to send up the Bond series. This more recent adaptation is far more faithful to the source material. When the film finally settles into the meat of the story — the card game — Fleming’s literary Bond, keen characterizations, and adroit plot development subjugate the cinematic Bond’s penchant for shoot-‘em-up nonsense.
But that’s only one change among many producers have brought to the franchise. There are no outlandish gadgets (because Q isn’t in the book, so he’s not in the movie), and the double entendres are almost totally forgotten (thank God). There are fast cars (Bond gets two Aston Martins, a vintage 1964 and a modern 2006) and “Bond Girls,” but the sex is kept to a minimum. This isn’t as bad as it might sound. Bond has heretofore been a mimbo; now, he earns his sexual escapade and it doesn’t render him tawdry and misogynistic.
. . .
read all
|
