Not Coming to a Theater Near You

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Casino Royale / USA/UK/Germany/Czech Republic / 2006

Casino Royale is my favourite James Bond film since 1965’s Thunderball, and it’s the best Bond film in a long time. The filmmakers push back against the familiar Bond tropes, and don’t care if they mess with fans’ familiarity with the series. This film is especially risky because here is a film franchise known for its painfully formulaic predictability, with Bond being as close as uber-male fantasies come to a warm, familiar, fuzzy blanket.

For the ladies, our revisionist Bond is blonde and studly, with Daniel Craig looking and acting like a throwback to Sean Connery, which is a very, very good thing. Craig thoroughly embodies the role, walking around through the entire movie as if he has a constant erection (that’s a friend’s line, and it’s totally accurate).

Bond was always meant as a dual male/female fantasy, and this is the first film in the franchise to get it right for both sexes in quite a while. Pierce Brosnan was attractive but really goofy, especially with his film tenures’ obsession with gadgets. Casino Royale reminds viewers that gadgets can be disposed of without sacrificing plot, so long as the most important gadget of all, the one in James Bond’s pants, tells the story.

I also have to say I like that Casino Royale’s narrative is a bit of a rough ride. The filmmakers obviously couldn’t decide how far to break away from the Bond formula, and the result is half a genre film and half an idiosyncratic take on the origins of a legendary character. Watching a mash-up of the familiar and the totally alien felt good, though, because it kept me on my toes, which was especially surprising while watching the twenty-first entry in a film series which, God knows, has been phoned in on more than one occasion.

The bad guy’s male, “tear-duct periods” were also very inventive. I don’t know what else to call them, but there was definitely some strangeness going on there in terms of body and gender politics. And having a key scene set at a human anatomy art exhibit only further explicitly acknowledged that the Bond franchise is all about anxieties involving the human body.

Case in point: we have a main character who’s an Adonis despite never seeming to have any time to work out, who drinks to the point of being an alcoholic without paying any physical price, who’s almost died repeatedly and yet gets back on the horse every time without any newly gained wisdom towards mortality, and who f**ks as he pleases – condom free – without contracting any major diseases. James Bond as a cultural figure is almost post-body, enjoying the pleasures of the flesh without aging or weakening due to his behaviour or the natural passage of time.

And speaking of, when is a Bond film truly going to break from its forty year-old roots and have an explicit sex scene? I ask, because I could have seen one (or a few) explicit scenes occurring in this film without it seeming out of place. I suppose the risk is ruining both a tried-and-true formula and the reputation of actors locked into a role which requires long-term committments, but at the same time, the excess of violence in these films has certainly evolved over the years.

Changing gears a bit, Martin Campbell can certainly direct an action movie. It annoys me when directors versed in action filmmaking get crapped on, with Michael Bay being the poster boy for these type of complaints. I agree that Bay is extremely hit and miss with his storytelling (though 2005’s The Island was unfairly dismissed as stupid, when it’s clearly not), but whereas guys like Bay and Campbell often mess up their films, they also rarely get credit for their strengths where it’s due.

The opening chase sequence of Casino Royale is an incredibly shot piece of filmmaking, with the footage atop a construction crane of an extended fight sequence being both extremely effective and well-staged. Campbell and the screenwriters also deliver on a card game which takes up nearly half of the film, and could have easily derailed Casino Royale’s plot flow. Instead, a traditional Bond setting is made unfamiliar due to the sheer on-screen length of its presentation.

Martin Campbell’s re-invented one of the longest-running franchises in the history of film by giving James Bond a weird combination of heart, remorse and consciousness, combined with more charisma and arrogant machismo than any Bond since Connery. The result is a conflicted character whose origins require a sometimes unsteady, practicted emotional repression and angry indifference to others, so that Bond can deny his humanity to the point of permanently becoming the cold, cool killer we’ve come to know for nearly half a century. This is the Darth Vader story told through Ian Fleming’s creation, but it is told much more convincingly and subtly than in Episodes 1 to 3 of the Star Wars series. Having already accomplished so much with just one film, I can’t wait for the next film of the Daniel Craig-James Bond era.

by Jason Woloski | Source: DVD
02 Sep 2007 6:48 PM | Submit Comment

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