From the Hootoo archive. Originally published December 7th 2006:
Ah, Mr Bond, I’ve been expecting you. For quite a while, actually, you’ve certainly taken your own sweet time turning up. Have you by any chance had a bit of work done here and there? I love what you’ve done with your hair…
Whether the Bond franchise was in dire need of a radical makeover following 2002’s Die Another Day is questionable, given the deserved popularity of Pierce Brosnan in the role (not to mention a global box office take of over $430 million). It’s a bit of a moot point now as Eon, Bond’s big-screen custodians, clearly thought so, even if the studio didn’t. Well, they’ve opted for grit over glamour and the results, as displayed in Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale, are startling.
The news that Brosnan would be replaced for this final Fleming adaptation by the surprising choice of Daniel Craig attracted only slightly more attention from the lunatic fringes of Bond fandom than the revelation that the new movie would ditch over forty years of admittedly rather duff continuity and be a very definite re-start for the franchise, but Eon have stuck by both decisions.
So the movie opens with Bond receiving his 00 rank and rapidly discovering the talents for monumental carnage and indiscriminate fornication and adultery that have made him such a family favourite for many decades. Surveillance on a Madagascar-based mercenary leads to Bond putting a serious spanner in the works of terrorist financier Le Chiffre (nicely played by Mads Mikkelsen), and, more importantly, probably the best action sequence of the year, as Bond relentlessly pursues the astonishingly agile free-runner Sebastian Foucan all over a building site. Seriously short of funds and pursued by some very nasty creditors, Le Chiffre is forced to organise a high-stakes card game to recoup his losses, and Bond’s prodigious gambling talents make him the obvious man to take him on…
Expectations for this movie were high, but it delivers in spades. Most importantly it does the business as a tough, realistic thriller. The opening act, with Bond basically wandering around the Bahamas and Miami for an hour, destroying everything in his path, is perhaps a little overlong, but from here the movie goes into a fairly close (by Eon’s standards) adaptation of the original novel. The character of Mathis, here played by Giancarlo Gianinni, finally makes it into a Bond movie, and Felix Leiter very briefly pops up (it seems that these days he is once again an African-American). The book’s most notorious sequence also appears, although Le Chiffre’s carpet-beater is replaced by a length of rope. Eva Green gets a chance to do a bit more acting than the average Bond girl, even if her relationship with Craig is a bit too underwritten to really convince. Martin Campbell’s taut direction is better suited to the various gunfights and chases anyway.
But the really startling thing about this movie is the way it handles the central character. It essentially ignores the characterisation that has developed (or rather hasn’t developed) over the previous twenty films, and goes back to source. Daniel Craig’s performance as Bond is closer to Ian Fleming than I would ever have imagined. He enjoys the good things in life and is extremely good at his job, but his job is applied brutality – he’s cold and hard and ruthless, and when things don’t go his way he’s prone to acts of almost irrational violence. That said, the movie makes it clear he’s not just a blunt instrument – this is a cunning and almost scarily perceptive man. You don’t want him as an enemy – but then, neither do you really want him as a friend…
Daniel Craig brings him to life tremendously. It would be unfair to the other Bonds to say he’s the first not trying to copy Connery, but he seems to be the first whose performance isn’t in some way a reaction to the great man’s interpretation. He’s playing a human being whereas Brosnan in particular was inhabiting an icon. (The Brosnan pictures, slick and accomplished though they all were, are now looking to me at least like karaoke Bonds – the greatest hits of the 60s and 70s remixed and repackaged with a knowing wink.)
There’s a lengthy coda to one action sequence where we see Bond back in his room drinking whiskey as he washes off the blood, something previously unimaginable. The relaunch allows the writers to have a lot of fun with the various elements of the Bond legend – the clothes, the Aston Martin, the drink, the catchphrase. But it’s telling that they miss a lot of the staples out completely. There’s no sign of Q, in particular, or his invisible car. (Though that’s probably the idea of an invisible car, come to think of it.) Essentially the reboot has given the scriptwriters the opportunity to dynamite away most of the dead weight of formula and tradition that have accumulated around James Bond over the decades. Rather surprisingly, the character revealed – and maybe released – by this is as compelling and guiltily entertaining as he must have been fifty years ago. Where they’re going to go from here I haven’t the faintest idea – but I can’t wait to see. This is very probably the best Bond movie since the 1960s, and one of the best action movies of 2006. Highly recommended.
No Chic. Just Geek. 
It’s a good movie, and a very good Bond movie, but I’m not certain that he’s closer to Fleming’s conception of the character than any of the others. Book Bond is cunning and perceptive, but he’s also something of a neurotic mess. Look at the beginning of GOLDFINGER: Connery offs the thug sent to kill him with a smirk and a quip; the ‘real’ Bond is still feeling bad about killing someone in self defence. Similarly, at the end of THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN he has real problems with trying to kill the wounded Scaramanga. Craig Bond strikes me as a bit of hard nut who is developing a conscience, whilst Book Bond is a rather sensitive person who has forced himself to become callous in order to survive. One of his weaknesses is that he is always falling in love with the present book’s heroine (Tiffany Case walks out on him, rather than he walk out on her, and you get the feeling that this happens quite a lot to 007). Dr NO tricked the movie going public into thinking that they were getting a brand new sort of hero by casting working class Scotsman Connery into the role of Bond, but in fact they were getting a very old fashioned action hero indeed.
Well… I would say that Book Bond has a much colder, dryer sense of humour than Movie Bond (by Movie Bond I mean ‘Bond in most of the pre 2006 movies’ but I can’t be bothered to keep retyping that). And if we’re talking neurotic messes, I think the Craig Bond qualifies, in both CR and Skyfall his troubled childhood comes up.
Your points are valid ones but possibly susceptible to a different interpretation – I always thought that Bond was contemplating mortality at the start of Goldfinger, not simply indulging in guilt. Given how TMWTGG starts (a brainwashed Bond attempting to kill his own boss) it’s understandable he should have qualms about another cold-blooded killing so soon. And you could argue that Tiffany Case leaves Bond (if I recall correctly this happens off-page between Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia With Love) rather than vice versa simply because they’ve been living in his flat in London (which he was hardly going to abandon).
I genuinely do think that the contemporary action movie hero as fantasy superman, which is what Bond is, didn’t really exist prior to 1962. I’ll grant that Timothy Dalton has an (anti)heroic stab at getting Book Bond on the screen, but the difference between him and Craig is that Dalton has to fight the tone of the movie, while Craig is actively assisted by it.
To be honest, I think that everything about Bond is open to interpretation. He is rather like Sherlock Holmes in that sense, with the author slowly altering the character as he writes the series. The Bond of CASINO ROYALE always seems to me to be rather humourless, whilst Bond of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE is relaxed enough to crack a joke with Tiger Tanaka. As with Holmes, I feel that some of the more unpleasant aspects were toned down in order to make it easier for the author to write about him.
I once had an argument with someone about what constituted a ‘wish fulfilment hero’ and just about the only thing we could agree on was that Movie Bond was one. He travels the world having exciting adventures and no consequences sex with the planet’s most beautiful women. He understands about the right food and the right drink and the best nightspots. He never suffers from self doubt or illness and he always wins in the end. All of the movie Bonds up till Dalton understood this, but Timbo always gave the impression that his Bond would rather be doing something (ANYTHING) else. The producers seemed to have forgotten why the character had been popular in the first place. Moore’s Bond could show flashes of vulnerability (SPY WHO LOVED ME has that moment where he has to admit to Anya that he murdered her lover) but in the end he never forgot that he was James Bond 007, dammit! On top of this, at the end of LICENCE TO KILL Bond would have been drummed out of the Service for disobeying orders whether he was successful or not.
You’re absolutely right about the tone of the new movies and the character of Craig being in synch. It manages to do what the Dalton movies tried and failed to do, and make him a bit more real. That said, I do wonder how sustainable this approach will be. Franchises tend to work by changing the guest stars and the settings, but setting the main characters in stone. I’ve not seen SKYFALL yet, but I hear that there are some shocking character revelations in it. There are only so many times you can kick the format without killing it outright (although I’m probably completely wrong about this!)
Sorry for waffling on, but it is fun to discuss stuff like this sometimes.
Excellent action thriller which I enjoyed both on the big screen and on DVD.
Hey, I’m the last person in the world who’s entitled to complain about waffling, so don’t worry about it.
Fair point about the similarities with Holmes, although my understanding is that at least some of the inconsistencies in his character are due to Doyle absently writing the stories while chatting to friends (hence other things like Watson’s war-wound moving around his body and his wife getting his name wrong). All these long-running characters have this kind of problem anyway.
My problem with Dalton’s performance is that his Bond seems to get into a bit of a tizzy rather too easily (possibly he’s trying to put clear space between his Bond and Moore’s). He’s a bit too intense, certainly in Living Daylights, but then again the writers were probably not sure who’d be playing the part.
I know exactly where you’re coming from re the viability of the Daniel Craig approach, I felt the same prior to seeing Skyfall. I don’t like Skyfall as much as some, it’s very introspective and twisted in some ways – and there’s one glaring divergence from the Bond formula. It does feel like it’s taking the Bond series to pieces. But by the end you get the sense that everything has been refreshed and the series is ready to get back to business as usual with the next offering.