The Times 16/11/06
By Wendy Ide

The stakes are high in Casino Royale. And it’s not only a poker-playing Bond who is risking hundreds of millions in this, his 21st official outing. The producers have decided that the time is right for their own personal gamble — a “reboot” of a franchise which, despite being dismissed by fans and critics alike as utter bilge for the past few outings, has consistently raked in generous box-office returns. The initial question from Bond fans — why fix what wasn’t, financially speaking, broken in the first place? — was rapidly superseded by another: Daniel Craig as Bond — what are they thinking?.

The immensely enjoyable Casino Royale answers its critics with an insouciant sneer and a self-confident swagger. The Craig naysayers are suddenly far less vocal as it becomes clear that the controversial casting is the best thing that’s happened to the franchise in years. Craig brings a brutally efficient physicality to the role and a thrilling undercurrent of sadistic cruelty — his is a Bond you feel gains real job satisfaction from his licence to kill.

In this back-to-basics episode of the Bond story, that licence has only recently been earned — we witness the two official hits necessary for 00 status in a grainy black & white pre-title sequence. The contemporary setting is explained by the term “reboot” rather than “remake” or “prequel”, although this is a selective reboot as it turns out. Casino Royale retains Judi Dench as M — her crisp, no-nonsense head-girl take on the role would have been a sad loss. And the director, Martin Campbell, has previous Bond experience as the man behind GoldenEye, the film that introduced Pierce Brosnan as Bond.

What’s new here, apart from the first Bond since Connery who looks as if he could do some serious damage, is the fact that this episode lets that damage show. Bond is battered and bruised. He makes catastrophic errors of judgment. His anger flares and he loses his cool — which ironically makes him cooler still. Crucially for the success of the story, Craig’s Bond is prepared to show his weakness in his dealings with a glamorous Treasury official, Vesper Lynd (a spirited Eva Green), who is bankrolling his efforts in a high-stakes poker match to bankrupt a terrorist financier. His unexpected tenderness with Vesper is disarming, his pugnacious prize-fighter’s face is suddenly naked in its vulnerability. We have Craig and, I suspect, Paul Haggis, the co-screenwriter, to thank for the most satisfying element of the film — the fact that Bond actually gets to develop as a person. He is older and wiser at the end of the film. For better or worse, he’s a changed man

BBC OnLine 13/11/06
By Tim Masters

Bond is back - and this time he's more gritty than pretty. Even from the first few seconds of Casino Royale it's clear how things have changed.

For a start it begins in black and white. There's Bond in the shadows, ready for the kill. It's moody film noir stuff, and it instantly establishes Daniel Craig as a tough cookie.

Director Martin Campbell, who so successfully re-invented Bond with the introduction of Pierce Brosnan in 1995's GoldenEye, pulls off the same trick here. With the new Bond comes a new feel to the franchise.

Gone are the gratuitous gadgets and one-liners, along with Moneypenny and pantomime megalomaniacs. Casino Royale feels like something of a homecoming - a return to the spirit of the Fleming novels.

Of course, there are action scenes aplenty in far-flung locations - Madagascar, Miami and Montenegro to name just three. The Bond girls are as stunning as ever, and there's a bad guy with a dodgy eye.

The revelation here is Bond himself. Daniel Craig is an immensely physical 007. At times he's like MI6's answer to The Terminator - crashing through walls and leaping from buildings with superhuman strength.

During one scrape he pulls out a large nail that's embedded in his shoulder and tosses it nonchalantly aside.

But he bleeds too. Craig spends much of this film a bloodied and bruised mess. It really is hard to imagine any of the previous Bonds being quite this muscular and, well, hard.

M (Judi Dench) says to Bond after the murder of a recent sexual conquest: "I would ask you to remain emotionally detached, but that's not your problem, is it Bond?"

The first hour of the film is full-on action, including an exhilarating chase sequence across a building site and an explosive episode at Miami airport.

The pace changes when Bond meets the Treasury's Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) ahead of a high stakes poker game against international money launderer Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen).

The chemistry between Craig and Green is evident, and director Campbell makes a good attempt at giving their relationship some depth.

In one notable scene, Vesper attempts to purge herself under a hotel shower after she witnesses Bond kill a henchman. Like Lady Macbeth, she imagines blood on her hands.
 

Bond joins her under the spray - both of them still clothed - and sucks her fingers. It's a curious scene for a Bond film, but it works.

The casino scenes are genuinely tense, with plenty of incident both on and away from the poker table. Le Chiffre has more to lose than Bond. He's blown someone else's millions and he has to win them back.

Mikkelsen's villain is refreshingly low-key. The infamous torture scene with Bond and the cut-out chair is all the more chilling thanks to Le Chiffre's ice-cold demeanour.

The Venice finale is not the film's strongest act. Amid the predictable mayhem it's Bond's love for Vesper that is the real focus. Loose ends are not neatly tied up - mysteries remain - we are left wanting more.

So there we have it. Daniel Craig has squeezed his pecs into 007's tuxedo and it matters not one jot that he's blond.

The anti-Craig lobbyists - if they still exist - should be reaching for their recipe books. It's time to eat humble pie.

VARIETY 9/11/06
By Todd McCarthy

For once, there is truth in advertising: The credits proclaim Daniel Craig as "Ian Fleming's James Bond 007," and Craig comes closer to the author's original conception of this exceptionally long-lived male fantasy figure than anyone since early Sean Connery. Casino Royale sees Bond recharged with fresh toughness and arrogance, along with balancing hints of sadism and humanity, just as the fabled series is reinvigorated by going back to basics. The Pierce Brosnan quartet set financial high-water marks for the franchise that may not be matched again, but public curiosity, lack of much high-octane action competition through the holiday season and the new film's intrinsic excitement should nonetheless generate Bond-worthy revenue internationally.

Bond made his debut in CASINO ROYALE when it was published in 1953, and while the novel was adapted the following year for American television (Barry Nelson played Bond) and in 1967 became a lame all-star spy send-up featuring Peter Sellers, David Niven and Woody Allen, it remained unavailable to the EON producers until now.

As refashioned for this 21st series instalment, the novel's focus on a high-stakes cards showdown doesn't kick in for an hour. But Craig's taking over as the sixth actor to officially portray the secret agent on the big screen (not including that first Casino) provides a plausible opportunity to examine the character's promotion to double-0 status, which is neatly done in a brutal black & white prologue in which he notches his first two kills.

After the pic bleeds into color, Bond pursues a would-be suicide bomber in a madly acrobatic chase through an African construction site, at the end of which he happens to be filmed killing an apparently, if not in fact, unarmed man in images instantly disseminated on the Internet, to the enormous embarrassment of MI6. Welcome to the 21st century, Mr. Bond.

Doubling the displeasure of his boss M (Judi Dench happily back for her fifth turn) by surreptitiously entering her flat, Bond ignores her reprimand by high-tailing it to the Bahamas, itself a nice throwback to the film series' origins in Dr. No. Following a cell phone trail of potential terrorist bombers, Bond tracks one, then another in Miami, where an evening that begins at a "Bodyworks" exhibition ends with a high-speed tarmac battle in which the fate of the world's biggest new jetliner hangs in the balance.

Even by this early juncture, the pic has emphatically announced its own personality. It's comparatively low-tech, with the intense fights mostly conducted up close and personally, the killings accomplished by hand or gun, and without an invisible car in evidence; Bond is more of a lone wolf, Craig's upper-body hunkiness and mildly squashed facial features giving him the air of a boxer; 007's got a frequently remarked upon ego, which can cause him to recklessly overreach and botch things, and the limited witticisms function naturally within the characters' interchanges.

As matters advance to the Continent, elements even more unusual in the Bond world of late, comprehensible plotting and palpable male-female frissons, move to the fore. Bond's enemy is not a Mr. Evil type plotting world domination, but a financier of international terrorism, Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), who needs to make financial amends by winning a big-pot poker game at the casino in fictional Montenegro. Bond plans to break Le Chiffre for good at the gambling table, and to this end he is fronted $10 million delivered by a most alluring messenger, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), assigned to keep tabs on the coin.

Their initial meeting on board a Euro fast train fairly crackles with a sexual undercurrent as they perceptively size one another up. But Vesper intends to maintain a professional distance from her temporary colleague, whose contest of wills and luck with Le Chiffre in the hushed confines of a private gaming room is repeatedly interrupted during breaks by spasms of violence and attempts on Bond's life.

Yarn does tend to go on a bit once it sails past the two-hour mark, but final stretch contains two indelible interludes crucial to defining this new incarnation of Bond. Constrained nude to a bottomed-out chair, Bond is tortured by Le Chiffre who repeatedly launches a hard-tipped rope upon his nemesis' most sensitive area, and Craig once and for all claims the character as his own by virtue of the supreme defiance with which he taunts Le Chiffre even in vulnerable extremis. Later, the startling, tragic turn in Bond's relationship with Vesper provides a measure of understanding for his rake-like tendencies down the line.

Script by series vets Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, along with Paul Haggis, hangs together reasonably well and is rewarded for its unaccustomed preoccupation with character by the attentiveness to same by director Martin Campbell, back after having helmed the first Brosnan entry, GoldenEye, 11 years ago. Dialogue requires Bond to acknowledge his mistakes and reflect on the soul-killing nature of his job, self-searching unimaginable in the more fanciful Bond universes inhabited by Brosnan and Roger Moore.

Shrewd and smart as well as gorgeous, Vesper Lynd is hardly the typical Bond girl (she never even appears in a bathing suit), and Green makes her an ideal match for Craig's Bond. Danish star Mikkelsen proves a fine heavy, an imposing man with the memorable flaw of an injured eye that sometimes produces tears of blood. Giancarlo Giannini has a few understated scenes as a friendly contact in Montenegro, and while Jeffrey Wright has little to do as CIA man Felix Leiter, he does get off a couple of the film's best lines, and one can hope he may figure more prominently in forthcoming instalments. Sebastien Foucan does some eyebrow-raising "free running" stunts in the African chase.

Casino Royale is the first Bond in a while that's not over-produced, and it's better for it. Production values are all they need to be, and while the score by David Arnold, in his fourth Bond outing, is very good, the title song, "You Know My Name," sung by Chris Cornell over disappointingly designed opening credits, is a dud.

Entertainment Weekly 17/11/06 
By Owen Gleiberman

In the startling sequence that kicks off Casino Royale, we see James Bond (Daniel Craig, pictured), early in his career as a British secret service agent, dispatching two enemies in a pair of initiation kills that will elevate him to double-0 status. One of the kills is classic Bond, elegant and almost witty in its efficiency. Intercut with this icy execution is a far more lurid episode in which Bond beats the crap out of someone in a men's room, bashing him bloody until he expires. It's a side of Bond we haven't seen before — but, of course, it's a side that was always there. (You don't get a license to kill for being a nice guy.) In Casino Royale, Bond is still learning to tame his impulses into a style, and he's all the more dangerous because of it.

It's almost impossible to think of James Bond without fastening on the trappings: the gadgets, tuxedos, and martinis, the cocoa-butter babes, the slightly ironic thrust of macho perfection incarnated by the words ''Bond, James Bond.'' In many ways, though, the attitude of Bond, the internal quality that makes him tick, has long been reduced to just another trapping. The moment, really, that Sean Connery left the series, Bond became a jokey superhero in a dinner jacket, a guy who never flinches because he knows that he's sure to come out in his favorite position: on top.

Casino Royale, which is based on the first of Ian Fleming's British spy novels (it was published in 1953), relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again — a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love. Daniel Craig, the superb British actor who has taken over the role, has small, wounded-looking eyes of coldest android blue, ears that stick out, and a mouth that puckers into a scowl. With his blondish hair trimmed to a thatchy bristle, Craig is handsome, and buff as hell, but not necessarily the most handsome guy around — he looks like a dyspeptic Steve McQueen. The fact that he isn't tall adds to the sense that he's always working a bit harder, that he's a badass with too much eating away at him to bother playing pretty-boy games. Craig's 007 has an itchy trigger finger, he treats M (Judi Dench) like a meddlesome aunt, and he growls at a bartender who asks if he wants his martini shaken or stirred, ''Do I look like I give a damn?''

That's the beauty of the movie. A Bond who doesn't give a damn, who's made affectless, even haunted, by what his job brings out in him, is a Bond we can all give more of a damn about. He speaks to an age of desperation, when the cosmetic barely holds sway over the cutthroat. In Casino Royale, Bond does many things he's done before — turns criminal pursuits into high-flying death stunts, plays world-class poker, faces worldclass torture. At one point, he engages in such a fierce battle inside a Venice palazzo that the building comes crumbling down (that's beyond spectacle — it's blasphemy). Yet Craig, speckled with facial cuts, plays Bond with an almost bruised virility, making each of these actions an expression of unruly will. Casino Royale, the most exciting Bond film since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, has everything you want in a pop entertainment: physical audacity, intrigue, romance, but also a charge of personality that stayed with me for days.

Directed by Martin Campbell (GoldenEye), the movie has a plot full of the usual vaguely topical hugger-mugger, with Bond trying to trap a banker to world terrorists — a numbers genius named Le Chiffre, who weeps tears of blood. Played with velvet Eurotrash sadism by Mads Mikkelsen, this mad capitalist isn't flamboyant enough to be a mythical supervillain, but when he and 007 face off in a poker tournament at the Casino Royale in Montenegro, the eye contact is electric, and it's one of the great sequences in any Bond film. Craig convinces you that Bond, shoving million-dollar chips to the center of the table, is literally ignoring the cards —that the bluffing, the psychology is all. After an attempt is made to poison him, he tells his nemesis that the recent intermission ''nearly killed me,'' and Craig infuses that joke with a roughneck venom worthy of Connery.

There is also, of course, a girl, but this time she's a true romantic adversary. Vesper Lynd, played by the dancing-eyed French actress Eva Green, is a British Treasury official assigned to stake Bond in the poker game and, generally, keep tabs on him, and as these two fling insults back and forth, they melt each other's armor. Bond hasn't just met a babe; he has met his match. And we have met him, as if for the first time.

The Village Voice 14/11/06
By Robert Wilonsky

By all rights, 2002's Die Another Day should have and could have been the final James Bond film. It was packaged like a cynical, weary best-of concert coughed up by an aging dinosaur, offering copious nods to the franchise's past without bothering to offer any new material of consequence. Yet here we are, not only prolonging the franchise but at its very beginning: the third attempt to perfect Casino Royale, the very first book in Ian Fleming's series, which began in 1953.

Set in the present day, this kinetic, character-driven take is nonetheless intended to serve as the origin story of 007—an introduction to the "mal-adjusted young man," as one love interest refers to him, who grows up to inherit a license to kill from Her Royal Highness.

And of course, Royale is intended to kick-start a moribund big-screen series that's had more low points than high. Yet to say Casino Royale ranks among the best Bond offerings is not intended as backhanded praise.

Absolutely it goes on too long, clocking in at 144 minutes, and absolutely half of the damned thing makes no sense at all, but beneath all the gimmicks and gadgets—chief among them a collection of cell phones capable of doing things of which Catherine Zeta-Jones never dreamed—is an actor who brings to Bond all the things he's lacked since Sean Connery fought the Cold War in a toupee.

Those who sweated and fretted Daniel Craig's casting in the role clearly never saw Layer Cake, a sort of gangster-fried warm-up to Bond. Craig, excellent in both art house endeavors (The Mother, Enduring Love) and blockbuster think pieces (Munich), has both a nasty streak and a soft side never before seen in the series; Fleming would recognize him as most like his literary creation: damaged goods in a tailored tux.

This Bond, unlike his smug, self-conscious predecessors, is a deadpan executioner with a penchant for letting his guard down too quickly. "I have no armor left," he tells this installment's love interest, British-treasury purse keeper Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), with whom Bond actually falls in love rather than merely into bed. This Bond's a rookie who makes mistakes that nearly lead to his death on several occasions—and to a torture sequence so simple yet so devious (and deviant) it makes Goldfinger's crotch laser seem tame. And this Bond has little interest in living up to the legend: When a bartender asks him if he'd like his martini shaken or stirred, Bond shoots back, "Do I look like I care?" In that instant, it's as if the part had never been anyone else's

Adhering faithfully to the novel, writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (now on their third Bond movie) and Crash's Paul Haggis offer the quintessential Bond plot. There's the oily Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) with the slight disfigurement, in this case a scarred left eye that weeps blood. There's the story line, involving the funding of baddies trying to take over the world (terrorists, in this case, as opposed to yesteryear's Russians). And there's M (Judi Dench), the scolding boss always one moment away from revoking Bond's license.

There's also the bullet-gray Aston Martin, the high-stakes card game (Texas hold-'em, to appeal to the dorm room audience), the champagne-and-caviar romp with a villain's wife, the travel mag settings (the Bahamas, Miami, Prague), and all the other accoutrements that decorate the doings. We are starting over, but not from scratch. Bond fans don't want reinvention; they'll settle for rejuvenation.

Director Martin Campbell, who resurrected the franchise with GoldenEye upon the hiring of Pierce Brosnan 11 years ago, accomplishes the same thing again— tenfold. No Bond film has ever offered a chase sequence on par with the opening one here, during which Bond and a bomb maker scurry on foot all over Madagascar. It blends the raw materials of such free-running films as Ong-bak and District B13, in which characters gallop and soar through cityscapes like everyday supermen, with the archaic conventions of the franchise and refines the whole lot into something crisp, thrilling, and brand-new. And that is great praise to heap upon a 53-year-old character who you were just sure should have retired a long, long time ago.