Yet another interesting review

[007]

Another interesting review from Everyone's a critic:


The day before I went to see Casino Royale I had the glorious pleasure of watching The Purple Rose of Cairo. It is a wonderful film that beats from its very heart a love for the magic of cinema. It understands and celebrates the impact cinema magic can have on our lives if only for that brief period between lights down and lights up. Many of the previous Bond films, and especially the best ones, are deliver this magic. They were films that took us out of our world and brought us into the fantastical, exciting world of James Bond. They entertained us, they excited us, they made us laugh, and once in a while they made us cry. Casino Royale is as far away from these Bond films as you could imagine. It is a nasty, boring, pretentious piece of work that can only make the discerning viewer despair at the state of modern mainstream cinema.

Pretentious is a word I never thought I would associate with a Bond film but here it is. From the opening black and white (why?) scene in which Bond viciously kills a couple of thugs Casino Royale is pretentious nonsense. Bond films by their very nature are nonsense but they never took themselves seriously and that was what made them fun. Connery, Moore and Brosnan all had an innate ability to draw the audience in. They harkened back to the studio era when people went to see movies stars and the films played on that fact. Casino Royale takes itself completely seriously. It thinks it’s a profound, dramatic story. And this might have worked (it worked with OHMSS and the other Bond reboot film For Your Eyes Only) if the film wasn’t dead with lacklustre direction, bored performances and woeful writing.

After the very flawed (though still enjoyable) Die Another Day it was plain to anyone that the next Bond film needed two things. Firstly it had to get rid of Purvis and Wade whose poor scripts had to be constantly saved by Brosnan’s charm and natural lock-in with the character. There is no doubt that Brosnan’s films would have been a lot better had they had better writers. Secondly, and probably most importantly, they needed to bring in a strong director with knowledge of Bond’s cinema history and who can handle real spectacle. Lee Tamahori’s stylistics did not suit Bond well and the best action scenes were conceived and directed by Vic Armstrong.

Well here we are with Casino Royale and Purvis and Wade are still with us and uber-hack Martin Campbell is at the helm. And instead of making a better James Bond film the producers were determined to milk the success of the Bourne films and Batman Begins and entirely deconstruct the franchise. This is certainly not what the franchise needed. The James Bond franchise does not need tinkering. It certainly does not need rebooting. The formula is full-proof and has been for forty years. What it needed was better writers and directors (and it would also seem better producers). So what do you get when you take all the wit, charm, fun and character out of a Bond film? You get a fairly substandard and quite boring action film that could be Die Hard IV if you change the name of the main character.

Sadly we don’t even get to see why Bond became an agent or what made him stand out from the pack. Near the beginning of the film M says something to the extent that she made a mistake giving Bond his 00 status and I have to agree. Nothing in this film gives any evidence why anyone would think that this guy who is as subtle as a sledgehammer and sticks out like a sore thumb should be a 00 agent. James Bond in this film is a thug and an idiot. He is completely unrecognisable from anything that has gone before. The film is inconsistent, not just with previous Bond films, but with its own internal logic. When Bond needs to be he is superhuman, jumping from massive heights with no effect, swerving cars and switching knives with superhuman reflexes and when the film needs to be “serious” and “realistic” Bond gets his ass handed to him by a couple of thugs. At the end of the film Bond goes after one person in an excluded location. He shoots the guy not with a sniper rifle, not a with a silence pistol but with an automatic machine gun. What spy would be that stupid? Nobody does it better indeed! The Bond we know and love didn’t have to get down and dirty, he didn’t use brute force. He was the best and used his intelligence to always have the upper hand.

Book purists may hark on about Casino Royale being closer to the book, but remember this – at best the Bond books are B-grade pulp. They are far from literary classics. They are not Shakespeare or Dickens. They’re not even in the same ballpark as Hammett and Chandler. The reason James Bond exists to this day is not because of Fleming but because of Cubby Broccoli and Sean Connery, Roger Moore and all the other creative talents behind the cinematic Bond. They created the character that is beloved today and the Bond every successor must be compared to. If not for the films the books would have been forgotten a long time ago.

Even if the book’s plot doesn’t allow it Casino Royale wants to be dramatic, powerful, even moving. It fails on all accounts. It is as dramatically inert a film that I have seen in quite some time. The film’s main hope of drama is the relationship between Bond and Vesper. Unfortunately Vesper isn’t introduced until an hour into the film and is then sidelined for an extended poker scene lasting about twice as long more than it should. Where is the character? Where is the chemistry? Where is the connection? It’s nowhere and the script (with romance lines that would make George Lucas chuckle) and lacklustre direction are at fault. Just because you substitute spectacle and puns for a poker game does not make your film more serious. At times Eva Green does ignite a small spark of fire and charm with her sour co-star but it is too little to get you emotionally involved with their characters.

Daniel Craig spends 90% of the film staring blankly into space with a frown and pursed lips. That’s serious acting, apparently. Never once did I think I was watching James Bond. He voice is very monotone and indistinct and can’t carry emotion unless it’s angry (“Do I look like I give a d**n?!”). His drama scenes are boring and lifeless. When in action I was constantly reminded of Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard, which with all due respect to Kevin is not his finest hour. I can’t blame Craig entirely. He is miscast and he’s only an actor doing his job. The majority of the blame must be placed on the direction and poor characterisation. I also can’t be the only one who is well past bored by Judi Dench’s miserable, annoying presence in these films. Every time she appears on screen it seems her job is to suck the fun out of the films. Even in the Brosnan films he was terrible. The one cast member that should have been booted out remains. By far the best part of the film is Giancarlo Giannini who brings class and nuance to the film in a thankless role as Captain Poker Rules Exposition.

The action scenes are incoherent, poorly staged and quite unfeasible (which again wouldn’t be a problem if the film didn’t take itself so seriously). The opening chase scene is ludicrous with Bond and his targets bouncing around like wushu masters. When did Bond become Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon? Campbell then shamelessly stages a virtually shot-by-shot remake of the Raiders of the Lost Ark truck chase at an airport. Apart from establishing, swooping camera-shots, Campbell shoots everything in hand-held close up giving no sense of scope or geography to his action scenes. Shot of Bond punching someone, cut to someone punching Bond. It’s all a mess.

[Kristatos]

I agree with most of this, though the guy badly needs an editor ("full-proof"?). Bit harsh on Fleming, though.

[James]

Reminds me a bit of the celluoid site comments. They said;

As exciting as the action set pieces are (and most of them are very good), they can't distract from the ludicrous spectacle of MI6 and the CIA fighting the global war on terror by sending not-so-undercover agents to play Texas Hold 'Em in Montenegro. (Next up, Bond goes head to head with Bin Laden in a high stakes match of Rock, Paper, Scissors in Cannes.) Despite the fact that most of the events of Casino Royale come straight from the novel, they lose all meaning when ripped from the context of time and place. The grim, vaguely S&M gay torture sequence that once packed cultural punch as an expression of guilt over an unchecked libido, now is just a weak excuse for a cheesy one-liner. Meanwhile, the plot twists of the original novel are reduced to an interminable 40-minute coda whose storytelling is so obtuse as to be almost unfathomable.

[James]

And this;

Three minutes into the interminable Casino Royale, and the kid leans over to me and asks: "Dad, has the movie started yet?" This has never happened before in the history of Bondage and I'll admit I was somewhat in doubt myself. Usually in the Broccolli family franchise, the customer is never uncertain as to whether the previews have ended and the main action begun. But this was different. The silver hues, the BBC-style video angles, the weird television music. Was this another commercial, a tie-in to the new James Bond flick, a spot for expensive watches?

And are you trying to tell me that's James Bond up on screen - a hulking blonde who looks like a back-up linebacker for the Chargers, and sounds like one of the extras in Tony Blair's cinematic cabinet in The Queen.

[Harvey Wallbanger]

Another interesting review from Everyone's a critic:



Daniel Craig spends 90% of the film staring blankly into space with a frown and pursed lips. That’s serious acting, apparently. Never once did I think I was watching James Bond. He voice is very monotone and indistinct and can’t carry emotion unless it’s angry (“Do I look like I give a d**n?!”). His drama scenes are boring and lifeless. When in action I was constantly reminded of Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard, which with all due respect to Kevin is not his finest hour. I can’t blame Craig entirely. He is miscast and he’s only an actor doing his job. The majority of the blame must be placed on the direction and poor characterisation. I also can’t be the only one who is well past bored by Judi Dench’s miserable, annoying presence in these films. Every time she appears on screen it seems her job is to suck the fun out of the films. Even in the Brosnan films he was terrible.

-DC's biggest obstacle is he didnt act like Bond. The rough edge Bond gimmick –might-just-might be over done.

[ID]

The Everyone's a critic review more or less sums up how I felt.

[carl stromberg]

I'm not quite sure what this bloke is going on about at times but here is another forthright and interesting review I found:

James Bond is the most popular English fictional character since Sherlock Holmes, the hero of 23 movies raking in four billion dollars at the global box office. The essence of his screen appeal has been the paradox embodied in the medieval word "gentleman:" an individual of refined manners, educated in the arts of conversation, dress, and cuisine, whose profession is violence.

The English gentleman was the outcome of a project lasting a millennium and a half to mold the anarchic barbarian chieftains who conquered Dark Ages Europe into the upholders of civilization. Like the Japanese samurai, they were gentled by learning aristocratic culture, without, of course, demeaning themselves so low as to have to get a job that didn't involve killing people.

Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale introduced a rather grim Bond. The charming but deadly gentleman Bond who had such an impact on popular culture was largely invented in 1962 by the director of "Dr. No," Terence Young. A public school boy, Cambridge grad, twice-wounded WWII officer, wit, bon vivant, and ladies' man, Young had everything except outstanding directing talent. He ended his career helming the seldom-seen epics "Inchon" for the Rev. Moon and "Long Days" for Col. Gaddafi.

What he did excel at, however, was teaching a young Scottish proletarian, a former milkman and coffin polisher named Sean Connery, how to act like Terence Young.

Ever since, the producers of the series, the Broccoli family, have periodically announced that they are junking the jokes and reverting to Fleming's dark characterization of Bond. Even the flippant Roger Moore rebooted after the sci-fi hi-jinks of "Moonraker" in the lean "For Your Eyes Only" of 1981.

Now, in "Casino Royale," the thuggish-looking British actor Daniel Craig (the blond Mossad agent in Steven Spielberg's "Munich") plays Bond as a humorless brute with a flat, classless Estuary English accent, and the critics (other than this one) are going wild.

Bond is supposed to be tall, dark, and handsome, but Craig is none of those, so there was much concern among fans. The filmmakers have dyed his hair light brown, however, so the audience's usual unconscious color prejudice -- in movies, blond is for leading ladies, not action heroes -- is muted.

While Craig is certainly intense, his dry ice approach suits a film shorter than 144 minutes. "Casino Royale" is mediocre in execution and bloated in conception, wrapping the usual elephantine Bond movie mechanics around Fleming's minimal plot (in the book, Bond doesn't even get to kill anybody).

It might have been interesting to shoot "Casino Royale" as Fleming wrote it, as a short, modestly budgeted Marshall Plan-era period piece about a secret agent trying to prevent a French Communist union boss from striking it rich at the baccarat table so he can pay back the money he embezzled from his Soviet masters before they kill him. But there'd be no action, just a scene in which Bond gets tortured.

Instead, the screenwriters have added stunt-filled first and third acts that have only the most confusing relationship with the heart of the movie, in which Bond now outmaneuvers a terrorist banker at a high stakes poker game in Montenegro. (Isn't the Texas Hold 'Em fad like so 2005?)

We first meet Bond in Madagascar (which has to be the least strategically located country on Earth) where he's chasing a villain around a skyscraper under construction, endlessly leaping from I-beam to I-beam like a Super Mario Brother. If you're not a video game addict, this can get old pretty quick.

After an undermotivated excursion to the Bahamas, Bond is at the Miami airport wrestling with some random bad guy who is trying to crash a fuel truck into the giant Airbus 380, but this whole sequence was done better in "Road Warrior" a quarter of a century ago.

Then, it's off to Montenegro for the big card game. Irritatingly, the movie cheats on its location shoots, with the Czech Republic, where practically every European segment is filmed these days (because quaint Prague wasn't blown up in World War II), standing in for the newly independent beach country of Montenegro. And familiar, black-populated Bahamas weakly substitutes for exotic, Malaysian-colonized Madagascar.

One theme the film authentically preserves from the novel is its most distasteful, Fleming's S&M obsession. Craig's character suffers as much pain as the hero of a Mel Gibson movie. It's the Passion of the Bond.

[The Sweeney]

With that last review, it appears as though the person writing it doesn't particularly like Bond - period! The person also doesn't particularly like Fleming's work either.

[Kristatos]

With that last review, it appears as though the person writing it doesn't particularly like Bond - period! The person also doesn't particularly like Fleming's work either.

Actually, I've found that CR seems to have been the biggest hit with the critics who have always slagged off Bond films in the past. It's a Bond film for people who don't like Bond films.

[The Sweeney]

With that last review, it appears as though the person writing it doesn't particularly like Bond - period! The person also doesn't particularly like Fleming's work either.

Actually, I've found that CR seems to have been the biggest hit with the critics who have always slagged off Bond films in the past. It's a Bond film for people who don't like Bond films.

In that case, the reviewer above should have liked it.

As for the many Bond fans on the Bond forums, they would disagree with your statement.

[Kristatos]

As for the many Bond fans on the Bond forums, they would disagree with your statement.

The ones that liked CR tend to be fans of the literary Bond, rather than the movie Bond.

[The Sweeney]

As for the many Bond fans on the Bond forums, they would disagree with your statement.

The ones that liked CR tend to be fans of the literary Bond, rather than the movie Bond.

I didn't realise how many literary Bond fans there are out there then.....

[Kristatos]

I didn't realise how many literary Bond fans there are out there then.....

I'd say they tend to be over-represented on the Bond forums, in proportion to their numbers among people who go to see Bond films. Though I should point out that I am talking in very general terms here, based on personal observation, I haven't done a statistical analysis or anything like that.

[Double O's]

I think there is some truth to that..CR obviously follows Fleming more concisely than the "formula" Bond flicks.

I like it for that reason. CR was ironically a departure from the James Bond "movie machine", yet a return to James Bond.

Hopefully, this is a sign of future direction as well.

[The Sweeney]

I didn't realise how many literary Bond fans there are out there then.....

I'd say they tend to be over-represented on the Bond forums, in proportion to their numbers among people who go to see Bond films. Though I should point out that I am talking in very general terms here, based on personal observation, I haven't done a statistical analysis or anything like that.

Well, Bond 22 will give us an indication of whether the general masses now prefer the literary Bond too.

[Blowfeld]

I didn't realise how many literary Bond fans there are out there then.....

I'd say they tend to be over-represented on the Bond forums, in proportion to their numbers among people who go to see Bond films. Though I should point out that I am talking in very general terms here, based on personal observation, I haven't done a statistical analysis or anything like that.

Well, Bond 22 will give us an indication of whether the general masses now prefer the literary Bond too.

I agree that Bond 22 is going to be the test of the general masses.

However the as to being the 'literary Bond' I would have to respectfully disagree. There are hundreds of little (and big) points to demonstrate where Daniel’s 'Bond' was alien to Fleming's. Where as the traditional Bond of the cinema was faithful at least to the spirit of the Ian's writings. Admittedly sometimes were better than others.

Personally I can never envision Daniel embodying the James bond of, oh say OHMSS for instance. Where Lazenby did an admirable, if not under appreciated Job.

[The Sweeney]

I didn't realise how many literary Bond fans there are out there then.....

I'd say they tend to be over-represented on the Bond forums, in proportion to their numbers among people who go to see Bond films. Though I should point out that I am talking in very general terms here, based on personal observation, I haven't done a statistical analysis or anything like that.

Well, Bond 22 will give us an indication of whether the general masses now prefer the literary Bond too.

I agree that Bond 22 is going to be the test of the general masses.

However the as to being the 'literary Bond' I would have to respectfully disagree. There are hundreds of little (and big) points to demonstrate where Daniel’s 'Bond' was alien to Fleming's. Where as the traditional Bond of the cinema was faithful at least to the spirit of the Ian's writings. Admittedly sometimes were better than others.

Personally I can never envision Daniel embodying the James bond of, oh say OHMSS for instance. Where Lazenby did an admirable, if not under appreciated Job.

I've just finished watching CR on DVD, and while its still fresh in my mind, the one thing I noticed more this time round was how close to Fleming this film is, mainly the second half.

The stairwell fight scene and Bond's aftermath in the bathroom, Bond losing the card game and sitting by himself, frozen in defeat, Bond's curious look at Le Chiffre during the game, Bond being poisoned and almost dead, the car chase and torture scene, Bond waking up in hospital.

All of these moments just felt like the pages of a Fleming novel unfolding on screen. This is something I have not experienced since watching OHMSS and FRWL.