November 17, 2006
Renewing a License to Kill and a Huge Movie Franchise
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,”
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-and-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.
An Agent Of Change
With 'Casino Royale,' Blond Bond Hits the Ground Running
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 17, 2006; C01
Nobody does it tougher.
Reinventing James Bond as a kind of Navy SEAL with an attitude problem, "Casino Royale" turns out to be cracking good entertainment, as well as a fresh start for the perdurable 21-picture franchise.
Daniel Craig kicks major maximus as a Bond who'd never use a computer where a punch will do; he's lean and athletic and fast, and the movie takes great advantage of his beauty in motion, particularly his on-the-dead-run. Besides being the first blond Bond, the first Bond under 40 since George Lazenby, and the first Bond to look like Steve McQueen, he's seemingly the first Bond to actually bleed. His face frequently looks like it had a close encounter with a lawnmower; fights leave him sodden in unpleasant liquids of his own manufacture as well as physically spent and far into oxygen debt.
That stands in direct counterpoint to the majority of post-Connery Bonds, especially Roger Moore but also toward the end Pierce Brosnan, who always seemed such lightweights that you suspected all that hair spray had soaked into their brains and turned them into fashion models. Hmmm, you mow down 400 Russian border guards with your trusty AK-47 and you don't even muss your mane?
That hair symbolized everything that was wrong with late-issue Bonds: Beyond their unbelievability, they stood for a figure completely unrooted in any sort of reality. The movies had become almost decadent in their removal of Bond from the physical world: He was a kind of male fantasy conceit grown stale and prissy, sited amid big, dull special effects that were always right up to last year's standards.
Director Martin Campbell's version astutely restores Bond to a real world -- note I say, a real world, not the real world. This movie is set, say, one remove from the possible, instead of, like those last few, 20 or so removes. Thus, this Bond fights and bleeds and can be tortured, but his pain endurance is a fantasy, as is his recovery time. He moves like a running back on sinews of steel -- fast, evasive, believable -- but he makes a few inter-building leaps that ignore the rude physics of gravity. He shoots well (much gun stuff), but it would have been nicer if he missed once in a while. Just once in a while.
Yet the movie also has a number of extremely shocking moments -- shocking, that is, in their tenderness, their tragedy, their human dimension. The scenes between the cool Craig and Iron Mistress M (the brilliant Judi Dench) really crackle with hostility; did Edward Albee fly in for secret rewrites? There's a moment where a young British agent is first exposed to the incredible violence of the world she's elected to enter, and she collapses in her clothes in the shower. Gently, Bond goes and holds her, not because he's on the make but because he loves her and knows she's in pain. Later there's a drowning death that has a tragic, nightmarish quality, a so-close-yet-so-far sensibility that will haunt you just as it haunts Bond.
Maybe these human moments exist because the film is derived from Ian Fleming's first 007 novel, published way back in 1952. It is said by many to be the most "realistic" of his books, the one in which he was a real novelist as opposed to the later ones where he was sticking to his highly profitable formula. Regardless, they do make this Bond slightly human; you care about him, as the movie -- essentially a kind of origins piece even though it's set in 2006 -- watches the new 00-level promotee find his place in the world, his style, his voice and possibly even his pathologies. "You're not much on empathy, are you, Bond?" notes the acidic M. Craig makes you believe in a supremely confident physical animal, more athlete, really, than agent, who ultimately turns into a seasoned, dependable professional -- without, by the way, saving the world.
The plot, in fact, is short on saving the world, as it is on magic gizmo boxes (okay, a big airplane is saved by attaching a magic gizmo box to the terrorist trying to blow it up; but on the other hand, a Venetian palazzo sinks into the canals, so in a cost-benefit analysis, it probably comes out the same).
Now, about that plot. Hmmm, wish I could explain it to you, but first I'd have to explain it to myself. It makes some sense, though a number of the connections were made so fast you more or less have to take them on faith.
Now, as a man who isn't sure if two of a kind beats a queen and a jack, I can say I had some problems following the intense card-playing sequences. The millions of poker fans out there won't, and I'm guessing they'll see the movie six or more times. During this period, it should be added, numerous other things are going on: Bond falls in love with British agent Vesper Lynd (Eva Green, fabulous, beautiful and intelligent), has a heart attack (induced by drugs) and has a machete fight with two African assassins. Still to come are a car chase, a torture sequence (tough, but it gives the director another chance to rip Craig's shirt off), that sinking palazzo, as well as a final shootout.
Half an hour too long (it drags when Bond and Vesper go off on a lark) and with a few too many villains we really can't place in the plot, "Casino Royale" nevertheless proves that you seldom go wrong if you make a movie that leaves you stirred, not shaken.
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