Casino Royale
Either all that OR a bag of chips, but not both. Supposed to be “grittier and more human,” which the franchise tries every decade or so anyway with varying degrees of success, frex, the first Timothy Dalton movie; and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; and even From Russia with Love, kind of.
I’ve never been a huge Bond fan, and the previews for Spider-Man 3, available just before Bond started, help me articulate why. In the Spider-Man movies, and the sort of action movies I like generally, the story doesn’t stop when the action scene starts. A fight in any Spider-Man movie advances the story. In a Bond movie it substitutes for story. A Bond fight tends to neither advance the plot nor reveal character, which is why they end up boring me.
The exception here comes early, in a stupendous chase/fight between Daniel Craig’s Bond and a cipher named Mollaka played by French stunt artist Sebastien Foucan. The appeal isn’t just one more twist on men jumping around and whaling on each other from precarious heights – we get that every Bond movie. It’s that the whole set piece contrasts Foucan’s nigh inhuman grace and athleticism with Bond’s mere persistence. Foucan sticks his dismounts; Bond sprawls. Foucan hurdles transoms; Bond barrels through drywall. Foucan becomes his own bumper pool shot. Bond triangulates painful but effective shortcuts. Foucan racks up style points and Bond settles for yardage. It’s a fantastic athletic narrative; it tells us, like the first hour of a new actor’s take on Doctor Who, what kind of Bond he’s going to be.
Then comes a whole lot of the rest of the movie.
Despite what I said before, there’s an unusual amount of plot in this Bond film, but since the action scenes don’t advance it, the plot just kind of comes at you. The final twist feels more like “getting that out of the way” than a fulfllment of the theme.
All that complaining done, there are some nice touches. We do get a little character development. Craig does an admirable job of portraying a not-altogether admirable man. It’s got some of 24’s faux-grit without its distasteful celebration of bureaucratized cruelty. The early African scenes are vivid. It harshes me out that they substituted stupid Texas Hold’Em for Baccarat. Baccarat is way cooler than Texas Hold’Em. It annoys me that the big-bad is one more capitalist. But it was worth three hours of my time to see it free. (Company function.) I personally wouldn’t want to have sunk $50+ on babysitting and full-price tickets, but like I said, I’m not a big Bond fan.
Comment by Mike Kozlowski —
November 21, 2006 @ 11:19 pm
2006: “Bond’s cartoonish antics are no longer relevant to viewers, so we need to make the film grittier and more psychologically realistic. This brings us closer to the real emotional core of the franchise, which I think maybe we’ve gotten away from recently.”
2009: “Audiences don’t go to a Bond movie to be depressed. They want to have fun! They want to see cool gadgets in action and admire the suave unflappability of Bond. That’s really the core of the franchise.”
Comment by Doctor Memory —
November 22, 2006 @ 1:42 am
I actually very much liked the fact that Le Chiffre was just “a” capitalist, not the megalomaniac capitalist like
Dr. EvilBlofeld or any of the interchangeable villans from the Moore era. No superweapons at his beck and call: he was just an amoral schmuck in a dubious line of work who’d made a series of poor judgements and was getting increasingly desperate to turn things around: just the sort of middleman that an intelligence agency might thing was a good bet to turn.I didn’t miss the baccarat, but they could have made the movie 15m shorter just by eliminating all the color commentary on the game and it would have been better for it.
Comment by dsquared —
November 22, 2006 @ 4:10 am
the Guardian had a wonderful idea for the opening vignette for the next Bond film; if the last one took us back to the 1950s and the start of Bond’s career, the next one should take us to the mid 1970s, when he’s reaching the end of a career in SIS and would presumably have become balding, slightly overweight, nervous about his pension (it’s made clear in the books that when Bond is not on ops, he draws a normal and slightly parsimonious Civil Service salary and he doesn’t have independent wealth), and quite likely to be recruited for something like Brian Crozier and Alexander Greenwood’s plot for a coup against the Harold Wilson government. Directed by Ken Loach.
Comment by Kevin J. Maroney —
November 22, 2006 @ 9:41 am
Baccarat is just Blackjack but with less skill; it only appears “cool” because to a modern American reader it is exotic. It’s a testament to Fleming’s skill that in Casino Royale he could make Baccarat appear to be a game of skill and depth. Of course, he did the same thing with Rock-Paper-Scissors in You Only Live Twice.
(Amusing that until this comment, I never noticed how much of a game-player Fleming’s Bond is–Baccarat, Bridge, Golf, Rock-Paper-Scissors all feature prominently in one or another novel, and I’m probably missing something.)
Texas Hold-Em is a much more skillful game and thus much better-suited to a Bond plot. But it doesn’t have the air of exoticism that Baccarat does.)
Comment by Kevin J. Maroney —
November 22, 2006 @ 10:09 am
Oh, and excellent point about fight scenes stopping the plot. It’s a rare writer who can make an action scene actually advance the storyness of the story. That was one of the virtues of the first Matrix film –the long action scene that concluded the film was stfnally interesting and forward-moving, showing us more abut the characters, the world, and the nature of the conflict. This virtue was mostly absent from the later films.
Similar comments can be made about sex scenes and “Omaha”, The Cat Dancer–in too many stories with implicit or explicit sex, the forward progress stops when the zippers open, but in “Omaha”, the sex is as much a part of the story as any other part.
Comment by ajay —
November 22, 2006 @ 10:31 am
dsquared: spot on. David Stirling was involved with that too, wasn’t he? (But the ‘original Bond’, Stirling’s friend and comrade Fitzroy Maclean, wasn’t.) It still amazes me that the UK came so close to a coup. But then France came even closer ten years before…
We’d need Len Deighton to write the screenplay, though.
Comment by Johnathan Pearce —
November 24, 2006 @ 5:56 am
Jim, I saw the movie last night and enjoyed it for pretty much the same reasons you did. I’ll post something fairly longish over at Samizdata when I get the time.
Brief point: yes, I think the reason why Baccarat is “cooler” than poker is the cultural thing: the French casino atmosphere, the costumes, etc. But I know bugger-all about cards and I thought the tension was built quite nicely in the gambling scene in the film. (Side point: I wonder how this will strike Americans after the insane ban on online poker?)
Dislikes: Craig is very tough, very ‘ard, as we Brits like to say, but he almost tries too hard to be the tough, cold killer. He looks like a psychotic (the very pale blue eyes, maybe) with hardly any humour at all. He struts about like a guy in a weight-training gym. The Fleming’s Bond was a tough sonafabitch but there was a little more wit there, he was less “in-your-face” as a tough guy.
The original Fleming book was probably too short and too focused just on the casino and on Bond’s love life to appease audiences expecting lots of gadgets and chase sequences. I urge folk to read the original stories, they show that Fleming was a pretty good writer.
brgds
Trackback by Samizdata.net —
November 24, 2006 @ 5:22 pm
Mr Fleming would be very impressed…
Last night, I went along to see the latest 007 movie along with my wife, Perry de Havilland of this parish, regular Samizdata commentator and friend Julian Taylor, David Shaw and others. There had been so much media noise and excitement leading up to t…
Comment by Sean Hattaway —
November 27, 2006 @ 11:27 am
I only started becoming a Bond fan with Pierce Brosnan. I was actually planning to watch all the Bond movies (from Sean Connery, timothy dalton, to Pierce Brosnan) when Casino Royale came in. I heard that it was about how Bond came to be so I decided to watch it before I do the movie marathon. I was first disappointed that they changed the image of Bond. Casino Royale brings out Daniel Craig — blonde, muscular, and without that gentlemanly smirky attitude and snide comments.
The action was great at the beginning. And there were a few laughs and a few punch lines. It was the most realistic James Bond movie. And I did enjoy it. And I would recommend it to any other Bond fan. But I would still prefer the style of the old Bonds.