Casino Royale (2006)
Dir: Martin Campbell
Icy Bond
by
Jack Knorps
by
Jack Knorps
I
should begin this review by noting that my knowledge of the James Bond Canon is
very slight. It is only due to THE BOND
PROJECT, suggested and carried out by Jay Maronde, that I have been able to
learn about the history of the Franchise.
I had seen portions of GoldenEye
and Tomorrow Never Dies in my early
high school years, but had never seen one of the films in its entirety until Casino Royale. Thus I am able to judge this film completely
on its own terms. And I would say it is a very good one.
The film opens in Prague, jumps to
Uganda, then Madagascar, then London, then Paradise Island in the Bahamas, then
Miami, then Montenegro, and finally to Venice.
There may be other Bond films with more “globe-trotting,” but this one
also makes wonderful use of an extraordinary array of beautiful shooting
locations—particularly the scenes in Venice, and the final scene of the film
(perhaps a “hidden” location).
The
film opens up with a relatively quiet pre-credits sequence involving an
assassination carried out by Bond which only hints at the plot of the
film. The scene in Uganda fleshes that
plot out, where we see a strange man, dapper, with a glass eye, approach a
terrorist group to assist them with their funding. They give him a large amount of cash in
briefcases and request that he invest it in a portfolio with no risk. He leaves, and he calls someone on his cell
phone and says, “Buy one hundred million dollars worth of stock in
Skyfleet.” The man on the other end
says, “Why? Everyone knows that stock is
only going to go up.” As a student
taking a course in Corporate Finance, this part was quite interesting to me.
The
next scene shows Bond in Madagascar, and this is one of the best chase scenes I
have seen in recent memory. He is
hunting down a bomb-maker for a terrorist organization in an attempt to get
information about who is helping to fund his and other organizations. This bomb-maker is quite an acrobat, and it is
quite humorous to watch Bond—admittedly in very good shape, but no acrobat—try
to catch up to him. Perhaps the key
moment is when he jumps to an elevator, and slams the lever down so that he
drops to the bottom at near free-fall speed.
This “motif” will arise in the penultimate scene in the film to
nearly-heartbreaking effect.
A word
on Daniel Craig as Bond: he is icy. He plays a cold, ruthless killer, who has no
sympathy for his victims (or at least so he later says when questioned on the
matter—“I wouldn’t be good at my job otherwise,” he explains). He has the ability to turn on the charm when
necessary to do so, but he rarely allows his emotions to get in the way. This does happen in the film near the end,
but in such a manner that one could not call it “false.” He is a good Bond, perhaps lacking the suave
of Pierce Brosnan, but adding a hard-nosed “darkness” to the character that is
quite appropriate for this era of film where morally ambiguous characters tend
to fill the screen and most filmmakers want to achieve the kind of success that
Christopher Nolan has turned into a trend.
In
London, M (played to perfection, again, by Dame Judi Dench) chastises Bond for
allowing the bomb-maker to die in a melee and tells him never to “go rogue”
again. Bond has actually broken into her
home while this conversation takes place.
He then goes to the Bahamas—not for a vacation, but to track a cell
phone call that he found in connection with the bomb-maker.
The
first time we see Bond driving a car, he is driving a Ford rental car to the
hotel on Paradise Island (The Ocean Club, which may or may not be a stand-in
for the famous luxury resort Atlantis—which is shown in at least one
shot). The subtle humor of this scene is
escalated when Bond waits for his valet to return to park the car. Bond kneels down to tie one of his shoes, and
another hotel patron arrives in a Range Rover.
He throws his keys at Bond and tells him to hurry up and park the
car. Bond drives the Range Rover rather
aggressively, parks it carefully, then slams it into reverse as if he is going
to park perfectly in another spot behind him—but does not slam on the brakes
and instead smashes into a car in the next spot behind him. Many alarms go off, and Bond throws the keys
to the Range Rover aimlessly across the parking lot. The lesson is that you do not mistake James
Bond for a parking valet or he will ruin your car.
The
cell phone information leads him to check out a surveillance camera tape from
the date and time of the call, wherein he is able to view the caller: another
bomb-maker. This one has a beautiful
wife/girlfriend/mistress that Bond sees as he comes out of the ocean from a
swim at the beach. She is attending to a
horse. He eyes her, and she
notices. Later, Bond seduces her in his
hotel room in order to get information about the bomb-maker. This scene is quite suggestive and may show
that audiences in 2006 are not as “prudish” for PG-13 purposes as in the
past. This film could get an R-rating,
but excessive cursing is not necessary in a Bond film, and the sex scenes are
edited just to the point that nudity does not occur while still remaining quite
intense. It appears as if he may spend
the night with her, but instead he leaves and goes directly for the bomb-maker—who
has gone to the Miami airport.
There
is apparently a new prototype of a plane being unveiled: Skyfleet’s biggest
airplane ever. The bomb-maker is on the
scene to destroy the plane, in the hopes of sending the company into bankruptcy
and the stock down to almost nothing. I
do not understand the economics of this plan, and I may be incorrect either
about the motives of the bomb-makers and the financier of the terrorist
organization or principles of Corporate Finance—but it would appear that they
would want the stock to go up! I am
probably missing some subtle plot point here but I confess I watched this film
on my laptop and that sometimes it can be difficult to catch everything that a
character says in this film. You really
need to pay close attention.
The
financier is Le Chiffre, who may or may not be French, but is quite a good
poker player, known for his famous bluffing which sometimes involves crying
tears of blood from his glass eye. I
will not reveal what happens during the scene in the airport, but the Skyfleet
plane model itself is fantastic, and the scene itself is probably the second
“great” one in the film.
From
there Bond returns to London and is informed that Le Chiffre (who has by now
been connected to the bomb-maker in question at the Miami airport) will be
playing at a $150 million poker game in Montenegro—will Bond play? Of course he will.
On the
train he meets the beautiful Vesper Lynd, whom he calls “Miss Money.” Initially it made me think that this was his
token scene of flirting with Miss Moneypenny, and that Miss Moneypenny had
stopped working for MI6 and had started working for the British Treasury
department, which is funding Bond’s $10 million buy-in for the game. But like I said, I have not seen any of the
Bond films in their entirety. For this
farce in Montenegro, she will play his wife, and they will share a two-bedroom
suite. He buys her a dress to wear, and
she buys him a dinner jacket to wear.
They go to the game, and it is adjourned twice. Violence ensues during the first adjournment,
and Le Chiffre is targeted by the terrorist organization demanding their
money. They threaten to cut off his
girlfriend’s hand, but he does not seem to care.
Shortly
after the second adjournment, something happens to Bond that I will not reveal,
but which sets up the third “great” scene—which is the final long stretch of
the poker game. After that Bond is
captured, subjected to an act of torture that is both frightening and hilarious
(in terms of Bond’s reactions, at least), and saved by a mysterious figure in
an almost random act of violence.
From
there he escapes with Vesper Lynd to a tropical location and they live happily
ever after.
Obviously
that last sentence is not true but this is a film that seems rather easy to
spoil. I will just say that the final
hour of the film is probably its strongest part—and that means no disrespect to
the opening and middle sections of the film, which are quite well done. I just enjoyed the ending because everything
seems to fall apart rather quickly and become extremely dramatic in a way that
catches the viewer off guard. And the
final scene (and more precisely, the final shot) of the film is instantly
classic. Perhaps there is a Bond film
with a better closing line, or cliffhanger, but it would be hard to imagine.
The
writer for THE BOND PROJECT, Jay Maronde, informed me that Quantum of Solace picks up where Casino Royale left off, and in this way, the two films are the only
Bond films that might be considered “two parts of one very long film.” Jay has also intimated that he finds these
two films to be amongst the very best of the Franchise. While this initially shocked me, with so many
classics in the past, after watching Casino
Royale I can certainly understand why, and am very excited to see what
happens next.
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