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Run,
Jimmy, Run
So when I say that Casino Royale is a seismic shift in the Bond gestalt, I'm not talking solely about the gutrumbling workout that the soundtrack delivered to my Pioneer twin-15s (though that's certainly part of it. I think there may be structural damage). The revelations start early. The pre-credit sequence is not a budget-busting stunt, but a straightforward pair of assassinations, shot in vivid black & white. The credits themselves are not the expected fantasia of airborn female silhouettes, but a colorful montage of men in suits killing one another.
Casino Royale , though it's proudly hi-tech, is in many ways a return to the pre-industrial gimmick-free Bond era -- a fact we're reminded of by the introduction of a '64 Aston Martin right out of Goldfinger but minus Q's armory. Despite the customary presence of that and otherfabulous wheels, this new Bond does far more running than driving. (Sadly, John Cleese's fussbudget "Q" is nowhere to be found. And I had just decided to add Cleese/Q to the Gallery of Absolutely Flawless, Perfect Casting, whose only previous entries are Chris Reeve as Superman and Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.) No, there's only one ubiquitous sign of the times here. I've maintained for quite a while that the most revolutionary influence on movie stories nowadays is not CGI or Hi Def -- but the cell phone. Everyone in this movie has one hidden somewhere, and nary a plot point passes before us that doesn't involve one. It's the shape of things to come.
There are wrinkles. Some of set pieces are too long: a shin-bruising opening chase around a construction site, and a runaway fuel truck at the airport. Terrific footage and stunt work, but less would be more. The card games, too, are too long and not terribly interesting. But I quibble.
©2007 KJ Fisher |
Here's
the odd thing about the Bond franchise: though it's flourished
for forty years in twenty iterations, making tons of cash
and successfully bobbing and weaving in the arena of public
taste, very few of the movies are really all that good. Most
of them came to us as summer barnburners -- we trooped in,
hot and gamy and grateful for a few good stunts, a few pretty
girls (or whatever), a couple of naughty one-liners, and air-conditioning.
Higher brain functions were home in a jar, and good riddance.
The first three Conneries are best of show. The Brosnans are
pretty good and the Daltons sporadically rise to adequacy.
But the whole intervening main sequence, including all but
one or two of the unfortunate Roger Moores, is a tepid mess
o'pottage.
This
story itself is a prequel, a sort of "What I Did Last
Summer," by yr faith. serv., J. Bond. What he did was
run a gauntlet of international ordeals that toughen him up
and teach him some hard lessons. He finally bursts from his
chrysalis -- no longer the hard-charging, sexually diffident
blunt instrument of yore, but the dapper heartbreaker. . .
007. [cue music: Monty Norman theme]
With
so few fancy toys in his chest, the producers apparently thought
it unfair to pit the young proto-Bond against the usual larger
than life planet-envying heavy. The villain of the piece,
LeChiffre, is little more than an Uber-cardshark, whose megalomania
is more manageable and down-to-earth than the vast psychoses
of the likes of Stavros Blofeld. I'm happy to report that
this downsizing has not been extended to the Bond girls, who
are still creatures of myth. High tech, low tech, or no tech
there must be girls, chief among them one Eva Green, who is
exactly as inhumanly gorgeous as she needs to be. Aging cineastes
of the 70s will be glad to see Giancarlo Giannini, still a
smoothie. Judi Dench is M again, and indispensable. She manages
the neat trick of instant transitions between nurture and
contempt in her dealings with Bond.
As
for Daniel Craig. . . well, comparing him to, say, Roger Moore
is like comparing Bogart to Noel Coward. When he struts on
for his final entrance, cradling an assault rifle like a beloved
child and transformed by loss, uncommon physical exertion,
and those damned martinis whose recipe he can't quite get
straight, we hear the famous Bond theme for the first time.
My heart sang. Here's a Bond movie that, for the first time
in decades, left me hungry for the next one. There's life
in the old boy yet.