The perfect figure rises from the sea-lubricated and lubricious, like Ursula Andress in the first James Bond movie, Dr. No - and the audience lets out a little gasp of sexual admiration, the voyeur's version of applause. But this body belongs to Daniel Craig, the new 007, and with his Sisyphus shoulders and pecs so well defined they could be in Webster's, it's no surprise that the camera lingers lovingly to investigate the topography of his splendidly buff torso. If Craig spends more time with his shirt off than all previous Bonds combined, it's to make the point that this secret agent is his own sex object. In any romance he has with a shady lady, he seems to be cheating on himself.

Body talk is relevant here, because it's the most obvious hint that Casino Royale means to be a very different Bond movie. The 21st in the official series produced by the Broccoli family (two others - a spoof called Casino Royale and a freelance Sean Connery opus, Never Say Never Again -were made outside the fold), this one tries to rejuvenate a 44-year-old franchise that was showing signs of tired blood and losing its appeal to the young-male action-film demographic. The writers -Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, along with the ubiquitous Paul Haggis -and director Martin Campbell wanted to go harder, faster, not to stir the formula but to give it a vigorous shake.

So, in the tradition of Batman Begins and the Star Wars pre-trilogy, they went back to square one and created a baby Bond. Casino Royale was Ian Fleming's first 007 novel, and Bond here is an agent on his first big case, a rough diamond who has not yet acquired his savoir faire or taste for the double entendre. The Craig Bond might know no French at all; he's not the suave, Oxbridgian 007 of legend but the strong, silent type, almost a thug for hire, and no smoother with a sardonic quip than John Kerry. Still, he fits one description Fleming gave of his hero: "[His face was] a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal and cold."

The brutality is on display in the first scene, which hews to the previous films' text by providing a daring exploit and a minor league kill before the stylized opening credits. This time, though, the fatal confrontation is shown in monochrome and takes place in a Saw-style bathroom. The killing is grimly realistic, as if to suggest that this Bond operates in the real world of real pain and has wounds that may never heal. A later scene, with a naked Bond getting his testicles whipped, inevitably calls up Abu Ghraib atrocities (and should have earned the film an R rating instead of the indulgent PG-13 it received). Bond can take punishment and dish it out, impersonally. When asked whether it bothers him to kill people, he replies, "I wouldn't be good at my job if it did." He's a killing machine - one of Q's most sophisticated gadgets.

Along with Brutal Bond, Casino Royale offers Hyper Bond, a character more muscular and kinetic than before. So is the movie. It's not easy to freshen up the elaborate action sequences that the franchise more or less invented and that have been imitated in hundreds of movies. But Casino Royale succeeds by taking a modern form of physical activity--parkour, the urban steeplechase in which participants run up stairwells, jump across roofs and slip through transoms that was showcased to exhilarating effect in the French film District B13 -and applying it to Bond's pursuit of a bad guy (parkour star Sébastien Foucan) on the high beams of a construction project. Marvelous!

Unfortunately, Casino Royale has to stick to the Fleming plot; it must also be Basic Bond. (The movie is so personality-split that 007 could refer to the number of the hero's warring personalities.) In this case, that demands not just the sneering villain (Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre, banker to the terrorist élite) and the tempting females, one blond (Ivana Milicevic) and one brunet (the criminally alluring Eva Green). It means that the focus of the plot must be ... a card game! We grant that high-stakes poker has its tension, especially if it's your hand and your multimillion-dollar stake. But dramatically there's something lacking in a movie climax that needs the hero to be holding higher cards than the villain. Luck is not fate.

But love is. And at last, toward the end of its nearly 21/2 hr. running time, the film arrives at its final Bond: the secret agent with a vulnerable heart. Bond has one, which he wants to give to his ally in the Le Chiffre charade, Green's sympathetic Vesper Lynd. It's a nice try, throwing romance into the stew, but after all its expert exertions, Casino Royale can't rev up the melancholy mood. Which is appropriate, for this is a Bond with great body but no soul.

EMPIRE Magazine Nov 2006
By Kim Newman

The only thing missing from Casino Royale is a truly memorable theme song. Otherwise, this has almost everything you could want from a Bond movie, plus qualities you didn’t expect they’d even try for. It does all the location-hopping, eye-opening stunt stuff and lavish glamour expected of every big-screen Bond, but also delivers a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Fleming’s short, sharp, cynical book with the post-WWII East-vs.-West backdrop persuasively upgraded to a post 9/11 War on Terror.

From Goldfinger on - especially in the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan films - the usual gambit has been to open with a pre-credits sequence highlighting amazing stuntwork and a larger-than-life exploit. Here, with a new actor cast as a Bond only just issued with his license to kill, we get an intense, black and white scene set in an office in Prague. Bond has just killed his first man – as shown in brief, brutal fight flashbacks which strain the 12A rating – and confronts a traitor in British Intelligence, exchanging pointed dialogue which leads to the ice-cold agent’s demonstration that the second killing is easier (‘Considerably’). The famous iris pose brings in colour, and a brilliantly-designed (shame about the song) titles sequence that highlights not an anonymous beauty but the silhouette of Daniel Craig himself.

For a few reels, Casino Royale lets the new boy settle in to what could almost be a Brosnan or Dalton movie – hard-hitting, but tinged with the fantastical. Bond goes off the map to harry the organisation of ‘banker to the world’s terrorists’ Le Chiffre, with a beddable beach beauty along the way, and a thwarted attack on a super-sized jet aeroplane which could have been the climax of any other adventure. Then, with a notable click into focus, the movie segues into Fleming’s tight, twisted plot. Readers will be amazed to find the book’s most memorable scene (involving a wicker chair with the bottom cut out) is included, as is Bond’s brutal Mickey Spillane-ish last line (though, here, he doesn’t quite mean it).

Director Martin Campbell, who set a high mark in GoldenEye that subsequent craftsmen haven’t matched, returns, and regular scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade get Oscar-polishing assist from Paul Haggis. There are nods to tradition, with respectful Aston-Martin product placement, but also refreshing breaks from established practice. Judi Dench’s imposing M is held over, but supporting comedy characters like Q and Miss Moneypenny sit this one out. Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre has a physical tic and a lethal girlfriend, but this villain interestingly has as much to lose as the hero, playing cards because he lost terrorist money and needs to make up the shortfall before his clients kill him.

There are miscalculations (a collapsing building in Venice is a gimmick too many in an emotional finale which would play better without all the noise) and audiences who just want a handsome fantasy figure might find a muscular Bond with perpetually bruised knuckles and the beginnings of a drink problem too much of a stretch. But long-running series can only survive through constant renewal. Casino Royale is the most exciting Bond film, in conventional action terms but also in dramatic meat, since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with the added advantage of a star who finally delivers what the credits have always promised: ‘Ian Fleming’s James Bond’.

Verdict
Contrary to pre-release nay-sayers, Daniel Craig has done more with James Bond in one film than some previous stars have in multiple reprises. This is terrific stuff, again positioning 007 as the action franchise to beat.

Daily Mail 4/11/06
By Chris Tookey

The Bond movies have been getting steadily more and more gadget-ridden and less and less about the character of James Bond.

Casino Royale takes us back to the basics.

At one point, Bond even drives a Ford Mondeo (though don't worry, he soon gets an Aston Martin).

Daniel Craig is probably the best and most serious actor to have been cast as 007 and this film makes full use of his range.

He's also the toughest and most virile leading man since Russell Crowe's Maximus in Gladiator. The numerous shots of his torso and piercing blue eyes will, I suspect, make many in the female audience extremely happy.

And he develops the character very skilfully. When he starts he is - as M (Judi Dench) tells him - 'a blunt instrument'. By the end, he's the sharpest tool in the box.

As if to show us that we're going back to basics, the pre-title sequence - traditionally a huge, stunt-driven action sequence - is in sombre black and white.

And the titles tell us something that has not been true of the last few Bond films - it is 'based on the novel by Ian Fleming'. To reassure us that this will, at the same time, be very 21st century, the first action sequence is all about 'free running', where a bomber is pursued by Craig over rooftops, along a tall crane and into an embassy.

Craig does a lot of his own running and jumping - indeed, he does more of this in half an hour than Roger Moore managed in all of his appearances put together.

There's a real problem with parts of the movie. A deliberate policy decision has been made by director Martin Campbell (who directed the first Brosnan Bond film, GoldenEye) that many of the action sequences happen before we know who Bond is chasing and fighting, or why. It's generally left to Judi Dench to supply the explanation, after the event.

This unusual approach makes for some minutes when we can't concentrate on the action because we're wondering if we've missed something. Well, we haven't. We just haven't been told what's happening yet.

Another weakness is that Le Chiffre is one of Fleming's drabber villains, and Mads Mikkelsen doesn't give him much personality. Le Chiffre means 'the cipher', and it's all too apt.

The premise behind the plot is that Le Chiffre subsidises terrorists, but for financial gain, not out of any religious or ideological doctrine. This feels a little weak as motivation and during the first less-than-gripping hour I noticed people walking in and out of the movie as children do during a panto matinee - not a good sign.

The film really starts to hold the attention during a mammoth game of poker, during which Bond suffers poisoning and cardiac arrest but demonstrates superhuman powers of recovery.

His recuperative abilities also come in handy after the most famous scene in the book, a torture session at the hands - or rather the knotted rope - of Le Chiffre. In no time at all, Bond is back on his feet, with his manhood miraculously intact, and enthusiastically wooing the femme fatale of the piece, Vesper Lynd (played, extremely attractively, by Eva Green).

This film may be about the making of Bond into a smooth, coldhearted killing machine but there's still room for humour. I especially liked the moment when he orders a vodka martini. The barman asks 'Shaken, not stirred?' And the still-rough-around-the-edges Bond pierces him with a look of contempt and remarks 'Do I look like I give a damn?'

Daniel Craig is much better at comedy than I thought he would be. But he really comes into his own when he has to choose between his job and a woman, and chooses the woman.

None of the previous Bonds could have carried this scene off with the same depth or sincerity.

Will Casino Royale be a huge hit and continue the franchise? I think it will. It's as action-packed, globe-trotting and luxurious as ever - though I could have wished for more motivation for the action, and therefore more involvement in it.

But the big strength of the film is that it takes us further inside Bond's head than ever. Despite showing us his sensitive side, Craig looks a far more convincing killer than any 007 since Connery.

Will the public warm to him? I'm not 100 per cent certain, but over the next couple of Bond movies, for which he's already signed up, it should at least be fun finding out.

The New Yorker 13/11/06
By ANTHONY LANE

Who said this: “It is interesting for me to see this new Bond. Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the center of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.” The speaker is Mathis, a kindly French liaison officer in CASINO ROYALE, Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, published in 1953. More than half a century later, we are back with Casino Royale, No. 21 in the roster of official Bond films, and we are back with Mathis. As played by Giancarlo Giannini, who was recently seen having his intestines removed in Hannibal, he is pouchy, affable, and dangerously wise, and his presence hints that this new adventure will not be an occasion for silliness: no calendar girls, no blundering boffins, no giants with dentures of steel. The same goes for hardware, with rockets and gadgets alike being trimmed to the minimum. It is true that Bond keeps a defibrillator in the glove compartment of his Aston Martin, but, given the cholesterol levels of the kind of people who drive Aston Martins, a heart-starter presumably comes standard, like a wheel jack. Whether Bond has a heart worth starting is another matter.

He is now played by Daniel Craig, as the world knows, and, if I had my way, the world would have shut up about it for the past thirteen months and waited to see the result. Mathis was right: what we get is a Chinese box, although one’s initial impression is that the outermost box is a packing crate. I cannot prove it, but I suspect that God may have designed Craig during a slightly ham-fisted attempt at woodworking. His head is a rough cube, sawed and sanded, with the blue eyes hammered in like nail heads. He could beat a man’s brains out with his brow. That suits the Bond of Casino Royale, who has only lately acquired his license to kill, and, like a kid who’s just passed his driving test, is eager to step on the gas. He will slay anyone, if he so wishes, and the news is that he does so wish, and that he worries about the wishing—not enough to stop the killing, although at one point he tenders his resignation to M (Judi Dench), but enough to make him wonder if he’s fit for anything else. Craig has the courage to present a hollow man, flooding the empty rooms where his better nature should be with brutality and threat. His smile is more frightening than his straight face, and he doesn’t bother with the throwaway quips that were meant to endear us to the other Bonds. The only thing he throws away is a set of car keys, having borrowed a Range Rover and slammed it backward into a row of parked cars, in order to set off their alarms. Calm down, you want to tell him, have a Martini; and so he does. “Shaken or stirred?” the barman inquires, and Bond spits back at him, “Do I look like I give a damn?”

The plot, unusually for a Bond picture, leans heavily on the novel. Bond is up against Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), who has a six-foot-tall mistress, a weepy eye, and nothing to cry about. His pleasure is gambling, and his career as a banker takes him to selected trouble spots, where he likes to meet the locals and help them with their plans for terrorism. What sets Le Chiffre apart from Bond’s preceding nemeses is that he has absolutely no interest in running the planet, preferring instead to profit nicely from its ruin. This is a welcome twist, one of the pitiable things about the 007 franchise being its fixation on global conquest—a cheesy homage, I often think, to the ubiquity of the Bond brand itself. When Martin Campbell, the director of Casino Royale, made GoldenEye, in 1995, the outcome was spirited enough, but it also felt stupidly grand, all wall-size computer screens and electromagnetic pulses fired from space. The new film has a leaner streak, and the high-tech attack methods are as follows: drowning your enemy in the washbasin of a men’s room; throttling him in a hotel stairwell; and, best of all, chasing him through a construction site.

This chase goes on far longer than expected, like a theological discussion in a Bergman film, with both the fleeing baddie and the pursuant Bond careening off walls and cranes and anything else that juts into their path. Rather than zipping through some customized hideout beneath the waves, decked out with nuclear reactors and sharks, they are merely making the best of their environment. Could this be something new in movies: green violence? It looked pretty natural to me, with Bond forever getting nicked and bruised. Casino Royaleis allegedly the first 007 saga to feature rain, and Craig is the first proper bleeder, standing in front of a bathroom mirror and contemplating his own downpour. (Look how he swallows a Scotch to numb the hurt, and then try to imagine the Roger Moore equivalent—the pensive sip, the appreciative smile at the distiller’s art.) This is still Bond, however, so the next scene finds him sliding into his seat at the poker table, in a bloodless white shirt; indeed, if my math is correct, he goes through three freshly ironed dress shirts in a single night, which suggests that he has off-loaded Q in favor of a silent Jeeves. Also, he has to look good for Vesper Lynd.

Miss Lynd is an accountant, employed by Her Majesty’s Government, and, just as The Spy Who Loved Me is said to have burnished the sales figures for Lotus sports cars, so Casino Royale should transform accountancy into the most erotically charged of the professions. (There is one horrific attempt at product placement, and I hereby propose an international ban on OMEGA watches.) Vesper is played by Eva Green, who retains from her role in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers an unnerving blend of the fleshly and the spectral, and one thing she definitely is not is a Bond girl. Vesper is a Bond woman—a Bond Lady of Shalott, I would say, with all the sufferings of the world reflected in her dark-shadowed eyes. Her skin is paper-pale and her lips are vampirically red, as if she hadn’t slept in a hundred years, although, whatever has been keeping her awake, it isn’t sex. She is the only woman with whom 007 partakes of coitus uninterruptus, and even that takes two hours to bring off. For a Bond picture, Casino Royale is amazingly short on lust. There is a moment when our hero lands in the Bahamas and glances over his shoulder at a couple of flirters in tennis gear, but Craig looks so embarrassed, almost insulted, by such levity that the experiment is never repeated. Bodies, it would seem, exist to be abused, not caressed, and Campbell takes care to incorporate, straight from the novel, a sequence in which Bond is denuded and tortured, with particular attention being paid to his organs of desire. Poor fellow. If Pussy Galore showed up, he’d pour her a saucer of milk.

Things have been so moribund for so long in the Bond business that it was always going to take some major defibrillation to jerk it back to life. Die Another Day, the last film, was a gruelling nadir, although the producers would be right to point out that it earned four hundred and fifty million dollars, which is three times the purse that Bond and Le Chiffre battle for at the tables. This means that the sight of Pierce Brosnan driving an invisible car, though bound to dismay every Bond-revering adult, was catnip to the larger constituency of teen-age boys, who were comfortable with a film that felt like a video game. What they will make of Casino Royale - no babes, no toyland, and the poker not even online - is anyone’s guess, but the earnings of the new film will doubtless affect the look, and the casting, of the next. If Craig falters, then I guess it’s full speed ahead to Chris Rock as 007 and Borat as Blofeld. That would be a shame, because Casino Royale, though half an hour too long, is the first semi-serious stab at Fleming, and at the treacherous terrain that he marked out, since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in 1969. Like that film, this one ends in despair.

To be precise, it ends with Daniel Craig wearing a dark-blue three-piece suit and toting a machine gun, which is the best, though not the most cost-effective, way to overcome despair that he can think of. The name Le Chiffre means “the cipher,” but, once the stage is bare, it is Bond who remains the enigma—as unbreakable to the cryptographer as to the torturer, and even to himself. Raymond Chandler once challenged Fleming in a letter, saying, “I think you will have to make up your mind what kind of a writer you are going to be. You could be almost anything except that I think you are a bit of a sadist!” As with Fleming, so with his creation: the fledgling Bond of Casino Royale has yet to make up his mind what kind of a man he is going to be. The cruelty he can manage, with ease; what he still lacks is the license to live. Hence the scene in which, flush with winnings, he shares a late supper with Vesper, as if hoping to dine himself into being a gentleman. Even his grainy features are flattered by the soft lighting, and, savoring the mood, he pays his companion a wooing compliment, then blows it by adding, “I thought that was quite a good line.” Even James Bond, in other words, wants to be 007. Join the club.

The New York Times 17/11/06 By MANOHLA DARGIS

The latest James Bond vehicle — call him Bond, Bond 6.0 — finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker. Now played by an attractive bit of blond rough named Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan having been permanently kicked to the kerb, Her Majesty’s favorite bad boy arrives on screens with the usual complement of cool toys, smooth rides, bosomy women and high expectations. He shoots, he scores, in bed and out, taking down the bad and the beautiful as he strides purposefully into the 21st century.

It’s about time. The likable Mr. Brosnan was always more persuasive playing Bond as a metaphoric rather than an actual lady-killer, with the sort of polished affect and blow-dried good looks that these days tend to work better either on television or against the grain. Two of his best performances have been almost aggressively anti-Bond turns, first in John Boorman’s adaptation of the John le Carré novel The Tailor of Panama, in which he played a dissolute spy, and, more recently, in The Matador, a comedy in which he played a hit man with a sizable gut and alarmingly tight bikini underwear. Mr. Brosnan did not demolish the memory of his Bond years with that pot, but he came admirably close.

Every generation gets the Bond it deserves if not necessarily desires, and with his creased face and uneasy smile, Mr. Craig fits these grim times well. As if to underscore the idea that this new Bond marks a decisive break with the contemporary iterations, Casino Royale opens with a black & white sequence that finds the spy making his first government-sanctioned kills. The inky blood soon gives way to full-blown color, but not until Bond has killed one man with his hands after a violent struggle and fatally shot a second. “Made you feel it, did he?” someone asks Bond of his first victim. Bond doesn’t answer. From the way the director, Martin Campbell, stages the action though, it’s clear that he wants to make sure we do feel it.

Casino Royale introduced Bond to the world in 1953. A year later it was made into a television drama with the American actor Barry Nelson as Jimmy Bond; the following decade, it was a ham-fisted spoof with David Niven as the spy and a very funny Peter Sellers as a card shark. For reasons that are too boring to repeat, when Ian Fleming sold the film rights to Bond, Casino Royale was not part of the deal. As a consequence the producers who held most of the rights decided to take their cue from news reports about misfired missiles, placing their bets on Dr. No and its missile-mad villain. The first big-screen Bond, it hit in October 1962, the same month that Fleming’s fan John F. Kennedy took the Cuban missile crisis public.

The Vatican later condemned Dr. No as a dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.

Ka-ching! The film was a success, as was its relatively unknown star, Sean Connery, who balanced those descriptive notes beautifully, particularly in the first film and its even better follow-up, From Russia With Love.

In time Mr. Connery’s conception of the character softened, as did the series itself, and both Roger Moore and Mr. Brosnan portrayed the spy as something of a gentleman playboy. That probably helps explain why some Bond fanatics have objected so violently to Mr. Craig, who fits Fleming’s description of the character as appearing “ironical, brutal and cold” better than any actor since Mr. Connery. Mr. Craig’s Bond looks as if he has renewed his license to kill.

Like a lot of action films, the Bond franchise has always used comedy to blunt the violence and bring in big audiences. And, much like the franchise’s increasingly bloated action sequences, which always seem to involve thousands of uniformed extras scurrying around sets the size of Rhode Island, the humor eventually leached the series of its excitement, its sense of risk. Mr. Brosnan certainly looked the part when he suited up for GoldenEye in 1995, but by then John Woo and Quentin Tarantino had so thoroughly rearranged the DNA of the modern action film as to knock 007 back to zero. By the time the last Bond landed in 2002, Matt Damon was rearranging the genre’s elementary particles anew in The Bourne Identity.

Casino Royale doesn’t play as dirty as the Bourne films, but the whole thing moves far lower to the ground than any of the newer Bond flicks. Here what pops off the screen aren’t the exploding orange fireballs that have long been a staple of the Bond films and have been taken to new pyrotechnic levels by Hollywood producers like Jerry Bruckheimer, but some sensational stunt work and a core seriousness. Successful franchises are always serious business, yet this is the first Bond film in a long while that feels as if it were made by people who realize they have to fight for audiences’ attention, not just bank on it. You see Mr. Craig sweating (and very nice sweat it is too); you sense the filmmakers doing the same.

The characteristically tangled shenanigans — as if it mattered — involve a villainous free agent named Le Chiffre (the excellent Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen), who wheels and deals using money temporarily borrowed from his equally venal clients. It’s the sort of risky global business that allows the story to jump from the Bahamas to Montenegro and other stops in between as Bond jumps from plot point to plot point, occasionally taking time out to talk into his cellphone or bed another man’s wife. Mr. Craig, whose previous credits include Munich and The Mother, walks the walk and talks the talk, and he keeps the film going even during the interminable high-stakes card game that nearly shuts it down.

If Mr. Campbell and his team haven’t reinvented the Bond film with this 21st edition, they have shaken (and stirred) it a little, chipping away some of the ritualized gentility that turned it into a waxworks. They have also surrounded Mr. Craig with estimable supporting players, including the French actress Eva Green, whose talent is actually larger than her breasts.

Like Mr. Mikkelsen, who makes weeping blood into a fine spectator sport, Ms. Green brings conviction to the film, as do Jeffrey Wright and Isaach de Bankolé. Judi Dench is back as M, of course, with her stiff lip and cunning. But even she can’t steal the show from Mr. Craig, though a human projectile by the name of Sébastien Foucan, who leads a merry and thrilling chase across Madagascar, almost does.