 Starring: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelson, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright
Director: Martin Campbell
Year Of Release: 2006
Plot: Recently promoted to 00 statues, James Bond takes on his first mission, which is to spy on terrorists and then infiltrate a high stakes poker game involving the nefarious Le Chiffre. Bond must win to destroy Le Chiffre’s organisation, but as he gets deeper into the intrigue, he falls for the beautiful Vesper Lynd and faces ever worsening threats. |
Let’s be honest, James Bond needed rebooting. While the Pierce Brosnan years were initially quite fun, by the time we got to 2002’s Die Another Day, with its invisible cars, ice palaces and diamond-studded villains, the franchise had become so ridiculous that it was undoubtedly on its last legs.
Renovating such as long-established film series was always going to be tough, but what impresses me most about Casino Royale is how economically the film does it. Rather than spending the whole film easing us into a new grittier 007, the film sets out exactly how things have changed in the first 10 minutes, and once it’s done that, it forges ahead as if it doesn’t have 45 years worth of baggage to tow around with it.
The pre-credits scenes take us into a black & white world showing us the two hits that allow Bond to achieve 00 status. They’re unlike anything we’ve seen before in the world of Bond. One is a slick, beautifully filmed, almost film noir-ish scene that highlights Bond’s intelligence, while the other is grainy, frenetic and brutal, which shows the more realistic violence of this new Bond. In less than two minutes, Casino Royale has already set out its stall and blown away any preconceptions about what this new Bond might be.
However the film was always in danger of alienating fans if it went too far away from what was expected of a Bond film. As a result we then get a credits sequence that that’s far more Bond-esque than anything we’ve seen up until that point. However even here things are subtly altered, so gone are the random, nude silhouette women, and in come CG men fighting. It’s classic Bond but not Bond at the same time.
Then comes the reboot’s piece de resistance, the much lauded free-running chase. It’s this sequence more than any other that completely changes Bond on screen and ensures the entire film’s success. It’s not just about showing us some cool stunts, but also about revealing exactly who the new Bond is, and that from here on in, we needn’t wonder why 007 isn’t providing his usual quips.
 Sebastien Foucan as Mollaka |
Bond is chasing Mollaka (played by Parkour founder Sebastien Foucan). While the whole thing looks more realistic than previous Bond flicks, in many ways Mollaka represents a more old style 007 villain. The stunts he does as he clambers all over a building site seem incredible and he has almost superhuman agility, however making him an expert free-runner is a smart move. It acts almost as a reining in of excesses of old Bond. What Brosnan and co. got up was utterly ridiculous, but Foucan’s stunts set up a new paradigm that says while 007 will take things to the edge of what it’s possible to do, it will no longer leap wholeheartedly into the realms of fantasy.
Then there’s Bond himself. If Foucan is somewhat representative of the old-style Bond, able to do almost impossible stunts with a ridiculous degree of skill and accuracy, 007 is presented as something new and different. He is not elegant or graceful, and unlike in the past he can’t achieve the unfeasible without breaking a sweat.
Foucan does things with agility, while Bond is just sheer determination. Every neat jump and slide the free-runner does is responded to with brute force and determination by Bond. Foucan nimbly thrusts his body through a vent, Bond crashes through a wall. The free runner leap off a crane and keeps running, while 007 crashes to the floor and leaves dents in the metal he hits. Here for the first time, Bond almost seems clumsy, but he is an unstoppable force who uses his brains as much as his brawn to get the job done.
In a few short minutes the film changes Bond from the suave, quipping agent of the past, into a force of nature. You know that from now on, 007 won’t achieve his missions using a succession of impossible gadgets and exponential luck, he’ll do it because he will not stop and he’s absolutely driven. The chase is also one of the few Bond action scenes up to that point that gives the sensation that what the agent is doing is genuinely dangerous and that he could seriously hurt himself (before you never felt there was ever any danger of Bond dying or really injuring himself, no matter how grave the situation). The importance of this is that it presents Bond as seeming almost reckless, which makes him a far more interesting character than he’s been before, and ensures you never know quite what he’s going to do.
The scene even gives a reason for the massive amounts of destruction that have always accompanied Bond. Whereas previously it was purely spectacle, here it’s presented as 007 barely noticing how much carnage he’s causing because he’s so focussed on his mission (although in both Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace, there are far fewer scenes of mass destruction than in earlier Bond movies).
It an impressive achievement, as in only the 10 minutes Casino Royale has completely overhauled 45 years of Bond history and set up a completely new style for the film. It does it with virtually no dialogue and by mixing the old and the new. It tells us exactly what’s going to continue from the earlier 007 movies and what we should discount. It’s a smart move, as without it, much of the rest of the film would seem like a confusing mish-mash of gritty realism and Bond style sophistication, where it would be difficult to pick out exactly how we’re meant to take the film compared to what’s gone before. Those 10 minutes are probably the most important in Bond history, and guaranteed that a franchise that seemed like it was on its way out, was totally refreshed and ready to take on the world again.
Casino Royale’s massive box office success – the film’s $594 million was the biggest take ever for a Bond flick – proves audiences lapped it up.
It’s probably the smartest reboot strategy Hollywood has ever seen, and also ensured Casino Royale has one of the best openings of any action film of the past decade.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Casablanca - Or, the difficult birth of one of Hollywood's greatest movies
NEXT: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - Or, why Tennessee Williams hated the film adaptation of his play
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
