Andy Ryan
I still remember the long excited queue outside the cinema. A new James Bond movie is never just another blockbuster in the United Kingdom, and its release is a national event, complete with commentary about “What it says about our country today”. Back in 2006, as Casino Royale hit the theatres, there was an added buzz. We knew we were getting a new Bond in Daniel Craig, but all the talk was that we were getting a new sort of Bond film too.
There’s an appealing myth that Casino Royale was a desperate gamble to save a series in crisis. It is true that, other than its well-received beginning with Goldeneye, the Brosnan era had been a critical dud. Yet, it was an emphatic triumph at the box office. Perhaps the brand was strong enough that you could have kept making big bucks with mediocre films that stuck to the template. The landscape, however, had changed and left James Bond’s position uncertain. In 2002, Die Another Day had The Bourne Identity for company and was not flattered by comparisons. Then, three years later came Batman Begins. Suddenly, the best action came with darkness.
Casino Royale responded. Critics loved the new grittiness. The New York Times enthused about a Bond who was “leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker”, while the Christian Science Monitor declared it the film that remembers that “007 is a killer”. Two decades on, and with the Craig era behind us, that grittiness still shocks.
The opening moments don’t show us our new James Bond. Instead, it shows a man resembling a mid-level bureaucrat entering a bleak office block in Prague. It’s the traitorous M16 section chief Dryden. We soon get the flashback to Bond killing Dryden’s contact. Combat and violence are a traditional part of the Bond package. What sets Casino Royale apart is the brutality of the fight and the grimness of the setting: a screaming victim angrily drowned in a bathroom sink.
Back in the present, Bond calmly kills Dryden. It’s not the first time we’ve seen James Bond as the assassin, but there’s still a shock in seeing the cold-blooded killing of a fellow agent, even a traitorous one. Not for the first time in the film, there seems to be pleasure in using that licence to kill. We get a final shot in the flashback, and then Chris Cornell’s theme tune makes its roaring entrance: “If you take a life. . .”. The title sequence unfolds, and you exhale. This does feel different.
And yet, you realize that a lot feels the same. Remember, Martin Campbell directed GoldenEye too. The story has Bond’s usual globe-trotting. The One and Only Ocean Club in the Bahamas, a Lake Como clinic, a Venetian palace and, of course, the Casino Royale in Montenegro all have the trademark luxury sheen. A ticket to a James Bond movie has always been a cheap entry to a vicarious high life. Not much more than half an hour in, we have a typical high-speed Bond seduction, although any glamor is cut short by the brutal murder which follows. The dialogue rarely aims for realism, and conversations are often the exchanges of killer one-liners that have always been the stock-in-trade:
Vesper: “It doesn’t bother you; killing all those people?”
Bond: “Well, I wouldn’t be very good at my job if it did.”
The action sequence that attracted the most praise at the time and still impresses now is the foot chase in Madagascar. The decision to cast parkour pioneer Sebastien Foucan as the bomb-maker Mollaka pays off, and his stunts are stunning. While it may be innovative, much of it feels familiar. We have the ludicrously over-the-top moments, such as James Bond driving the bulldozer. We have humor amid the tension, with Bond following Mollaka’s inch-perfect precision leap by running through a wall. It’s undoubtedly a Bond action sequence.
The film is, on occasion, more closely tied to reality than expected. Early on, we see M (Judi Dench) leaving a Parliamentary select committee and grumbling, “Who the hell do they think they are?” Far from the glamor and action, this is bureaucracy and democracy, with M as a civil servant having to account to politicians. Soon, though, we’re firmly back in the world of fiction and often absurdity. The world the rest of us live in is only ever allowed to intrude for so long.
So Casino Royale is different and yet also very much the same as its predecessors. That balance is why it was a successful reboot of the series. Changing times invited something new, and yet there was still affection for the spirit of what had come before. Co-writer Paul Haggis declared, “We’re trying to do for Bond what Batman Begins did for Batman.”
This is more complicated than it sounds. I think Christopher Nolan and his team had the freedom to go further, with Matt Reeves then going even darker in 2022’s The Batman. Those in charge of Casino Royale had to tread more carefully. While the Ian Fleming novels have plenty of toughness to draw on, the James Bond films always had a lightness that has been part of the appeal and the escapism. “Gritty” was welcome up to a point, but no one wants it in their daydreams.
For all the plans and visions of the writers and directors, Casino Royale rests on the performance of Daniel Craig. Near the end, we see Bond desperately trying to save Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) and in palpable agony after he’s unable to. Craig and most of his predecessors mastered the suave cool, but I wonder if any of them could have delivered the pain of that moment with the force that he does. The film found that balance of dark and light, old and new in Craig’s performance. We’re still in an unreal world but with a very real James Bond.
While Casino Royale’s quality is broadly accepted, there is more of a debate about the success of the Craig era as a whole. It’s one thing to reboot. It’s another to sustain that and build an extended narrative arc. There is, at times, an awkwardness in the efforts to create films that are both the spectacular standalones expected of the franchise and also link episodes that build coherently on each other. Having established Craig as a James Bond with depth, it wasn’t clear that those in charge always knew quite how deep they wanted to go.
As Amazon makes plans for what to do with their takeover, I hope they’re looking to Casino Royale for lessons. Do you go for continuity? Or another fresh start? On the announcement that he would direct the next film, director Denis Villeneuve said, “I’m a die-hard Bond fan. To me, he’s sacred territory. I intend to honour the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come.” The Dune filmmaker is reassuring fans that James Bond will remain recognizably Bond. At the same time, you can’t “open the path” without some innovation. Once more, the skill will again be in finding that balance.
“The job’s done. And the bitch is dead.”
I still find myself gasping at Bond’s brutal line to M on Vesper’s death. Surely James Bond wouldn’t say that? It sounded very 21st century, a moment where I wondered if the film had gone too dark. It was only later that I learnt that it was the closing line of the original 1953 Ian Fleming novel. New and old don’t always combine in the way that you’d expect.
