Casino Royale

... or as it might have been called 'Bond Begins' (cos it's a bit like Batman Begins geddit?). Anyway, I'm a big fan of rebooting franchises in this way, which obviously Bond has been doing periodically for a while now. This time the selling points are 1. It's quite faithful to the book. 2. Daniel Craig is well 'ard. Both these sales pitches are fulfilled, you actually believe that Craig could have been a commander in the SBS, (unlike Brosnan who always came across as something between Brian Ferry and my uncle David) and Bonds character, an outsider, a cold blooded killer etc. seems much more faithful to my memory of the books.

So, whilst I'm not a big Bond fan (I have some affection for the early Connery films and quite enjoy Roger Moores clowning), this is my favourite Bond film. But therein lies the problem; this is a Bond film and if you don't want people to leave the cinema dissapointed then you have to do certain things: Firstly you have to have an overlong credits sequence in which a pompous theme song plays over a faintly psychadelic montage*. Secondly you have to have gadgets, so in a scene where for plot purposes a bit of vomitting and a shot of adreneline would have done nicely we have Bond using a defibrillator that's built into the dashboard of his Aston Martin. Which brings us neatly to the third thing that's expected from James Bond films, product placement. Right from the start Bond's been schilling products in his movies (Smirnoff and the aforementioned Aston Martin most famously) but in this film there are some seriously egregious examples: i) A completely purposeless shot of Bond driving a Ford. ii) At one point the plot and characters take a break to advertise a watch. iii) Baddies exclusively use top of the range Sony Ericson phones.

Oh yeah, also you need girls in bikinis and exploding things. Both present and correct.

So in the end the bagage of the franchise just little too much. The films will never match the freshness of The Bourne Identity/Supremacy because they have to do certain things so that hoards of breying twats in hired DJs at Henry J Bean's James Bond theme night** won't come out of the cinema saying 'yeah but it's just not Bond', this latest addition to the series already stretched the credulity and loyalty of this market by having (OMG) a blonde James Bond and by having him show emotional weakness (incidentally, the love section of the film is the bit they should cut (obviously, like pretty much every other film ever made, I thought this one was too long) not the casino scenes which are rather excellent and where the narrative seemed to me to move along most naturally. You can tell when a part of a films not working becasue they'll lean heavily on the soundtrack to tell the audience how they should be reacting, the vague echos of 'We have all the time in the world' during the love bits section kind of give the game away).

So not as successful a franchise reboot as Batman Begins was (esp. as Judy Dench jarringly appears in this hypertimeline, still at least they didn't bring back John Cleese) and not as sucessfull as a modern spy thriller as the Bourne films, but an entertaining and mindless way to spend a couple of hours.

*taken separately the intro sequence is very nice, recalling Shinola's video for Go With The Flow
**half price cocktails + hired roulette wheel + atlest 3 girls in white bikinis = ch-ching!

IMDB