In his first mission, James Bond (Daniel Craig) goes head-to-head with Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), a “banker for the world’s terrorists”. After Le Chiffre loses his clients’ money betting against the stock market, he has organised a high stakes poker game to win back the missing funds.
Bond is tasked with beating Le Chiffre and bringing him in before his clients find out what he's done and kill him.
Paired with Treasury agent Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), Bond is confronted by someone who sees through his armoured front and bravado.
As the game progresses and the stakes rise, Bond and Lynd are drawn together.
The green agent is faced with two potential futures - becoming a cold-blooded killer like Le Chiffre or leaving with Lynd and saving what little humanity he has left. If he can survive the card game, that is…
In the run up to the release (fingers crossed) of No Time To Die, my local is playing all of the Daniel Craig Bond movies. This will be the first time I have been able to see them this way since their releases. One of the big lessons I took from the Fast & Furious marathon was how much the big screen added to the experience.
Casino Royale is a film made for the movie theatre.
The photography is vibrant, has great depth of field and chunky sound design that turns every punch, bullet and inhale of breath into an explosion.
This movie has the reputation of being down-to-earth but on the big screen it resembles the heightened aesthetic of an Eighties action movie.
The action set pieces pack that rare mix of exuberance and visceral impact. Craig may be a human battering ram but the filmmakers make sure that the viewer gets a taste of his pain and exhaustion.
It is easy to forget how much of a shock this movie was back in 2006 - Bond is generally Teflon, with only minor injuries that last the duration of a scene. Casino Royale is obsessed with Craig’s body, its strength, speed and how much punishment it can handle.
Director Martin Campbell’s style is functional but operatic - as a poisoned Craig lurches toward safety, the camera apes his unbalanced perspective with exaggerated movement; characters look into, explode towards or fall away from the screen like it’s in 3D.
It manages to be both visually extravagant and restrained - the camera is always in the right place, it moves just enough so we know what is important, and it is cut so that we can always keep track of geography.
This aspect of the film also highlights one of my favourite elements of Campbell’s direction, at least in the films I have seen: every time Bond or one of the villains realises they are in danger, they IMMEDIATELY snap into action. There is no flourish or delay e.g. Obanno’s (Isaac de Bankolé) bodyguard (Michael Offei) clocks Bond’s earwig, pivots and fires.
This body language is a key element of how the danger in Casino Royale is presented - Bond exists in a world of professional killers, and they all have the same bassline of professionalism.
This movie has a really good handle on tone. This movie is pretty dark, but it knows when to let the audience depressurise. Bond snatching the gun and throwing it back at Molaka; Bond crashing the snooty tourist’s car; Bond charming Solange with the Aston Martin; Bond’s quip about his lamb/ego being skewered...
Casino Royale is way funnier than the general consensus will have you believe.
Part of what makes the torture scene work is how Bond uses humour to take away Le Chiffre’s power. Bond is dead-to-rights, yet he is able to frustrate the villains’ attempts to break him. It is also to give the audience a safety valve - but most importantly, it never defuses the stakes of the situation.
Despite its strengths, the movie does have its flaws. Stuck in a movie theatre for its 144 minute runtime, without the option to get a snack or fall down a Twitter rabbithole, Casino Royale also feels long - like three movies glued together.
There are also some moments of visual story-telling which hit you over the head, and while Mathis is great, those exposition dumps during the card game grate every time I watch it.
I feel weird writing this but I do not know if this movie still works for me. Maybe this viewing caught me in a specific mood, but I found myself detached from the experience, and paying attention to the reactions of the other people in the audience, particularly for the comedic beats.
I was really conscious of it when Vesper Lynd entered the picture. This relationship has always been the CPU of this movie. The action is great, but my favourite scene has always been Bond comforting Lynd in the shower.
This time it did not work for me. It left me cold.
Something was off and I think it has something to do with the passage of time.
I recently lost my grandmother, and we held her service at my old highschool (where she used to work). The double-barrel of going through that event at that particular location has made me think about the past in a way I have not before.
To tie it into this movie, the last time I saw it on the big screen, I had just left that high school. I had not had any big life experiences like lost family members or professional successes/failures. The world was wide open and full of possibilities. And it felt like the James Bond franchise was in a similar space. I always tie that transition moment to this movie, and I think in retrospect, that made it more special to me. And maybe my feelings have changed because I have changed.
I also spent the movie thinking about how much has changed in the world since 2006 - we have had a recession, multiple conflicts, the rise of global fascism, a pandemic and, of course, climate change. Everything feels so much more urgent and hopeless now (feelings which will probably be validated by this movie’s sequel).
Cinematically we are also a world away from where we were in 2006. All the trends and influences which birthed Craig’s bond have either died away or ripened to the point of parody. Jason Bourne is irrelevant, the Batman franchise is plunking even darker depths post-Nolan and the Marvel juggernaut has completely redefined the idea of a cinematic franchise.
And then there is the Craig era which followed. At the time, I never thought he would last this long. I thought his run would end up truncated like Dalton - and it could have after Quantum. Thanks to various production delays and the pandemic, Craig’s tenure has made him the longest-serving Bond. And like Roger Moore, that time has completely remoulded the general conception of the Bond idea.
I might have to revise this idea but I was struck by how different this movie feels from the movies that came after it. Those movies feel more attached to the past and stuck to a different idea of Bond. He doesn’t feel as malleable as he does here.
The other idea that I cannot shake is how much this movie felt like the culmination of the Brosnan movies. You look back at those movies and all of them are trying to ground and expand upon Bond's character - he is confronted with stronger women, the missions become more personal, and Brosnan’s portrayal - for all the criticism about ‘pain face’ and other affectations - is more serious than the movies perhaps intend. It feels like the franchise was wrestling with trying to push itself forward, but they were too afraid to leave the formula behind. It took the opportunity of a new actor for the series’ brains to finally achieve what they wanted to do.
We get a more complex and developed woman who puts Bond in his place and affects his character, we get a Bond who feels human and the formula is not there as a safety net to avoid hard narrative turns. People talk about GoldenEye as the third Dalton movie, but I think an equally strong case could be made for Casino Royale as the final affirmation of the Brosnan era’s experimentation, rather than a straight rejection of its more formulaic elements.
Phew. I was not expecting to write so much. I hope I can enjoy this movie in the future, but on this viewing I was more focused on it as a time-capsule.
Maybe my quantum of solace for Casino Royale will be restored after I watch its successor…
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