| BUSTED FLUSH? : Martin Campbell's 'Casino Royale' [6/10] |
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| Wednesday, 22 November 2006 | |
  Casino Royale is a fair-to-middling Bond, though by no means unpromising as a relaunch/reboot of English-speaking cinema's most venerable and moneymaking franchise. If nothing else, Craig is the first 007 to match up to Ian Fleming's description of the character as resembling a harder-edged version of Hoagy Carmichael. And his punch/shoot-first-think-later approach more than fits the bill as what M (Judi Dench) only semi-disapprovingly describes as a "blunt instrument." Is it an overhang from Craig's turn in The Mother, or is there just the slightest hint of a sexual frisson between Bond and M here? He's clearly intended to be 'catnip for the ladies,' a struttingly priapic bantam rather uncomfortably wedged into tuxedo for the rather tedious card-game which fills the middle of this broken-backed, (all-too-predictably) overlong exercise in decadently banal escapism. Not that the enterprise is devoid of pleasures: among them Mads Mikkelsen as shady moneyman 'Le Chiffre' (= 'The Number' : counterpart to a man so often simply known as '007'?), the Danish thespian rather blithely cast as an "Albanian (former) chess-prodigy". Eva Green gets rather more to do than the usual Bond babes as HM Treasury representative Vesper Lynd, who bankrolls 007 at the card-table until two hefty defeats by Le Chiffre cause her to (justifiably) resist chucking good money after bad. At which point Jeffrey Wright (elegantly slumming) pops up as CIA representative Felix Leiter, offering Bond the chance to continue with the financial support of the US Govt: typically, the script makes absolutely nothing of what might be interpreted as somewhat eyebrow-raising 'allegiance-flexibility' on Bond's part. Leiter's handy appearance is, of course, merely a mechanism to keep the plot lurching along: likewise Jesper Christensen's fleeting appearances as the mysterious eminence grise Mr White - who might as well be called Mr D.E.Machina for the way he very conveniently turns up to save Bond's bacon (not to mention the most sensitive portions of his pumped-up anatomy) during a straight-from-the-novel torture sequence. This is one of many scenes which seeks to bring Bond up to date and into something approaching the real world, and thus (along with some sprinkling of post-modernism on the dialogue) convince us that he's worthy of our attention in a world which already contains The Bourne Supremacy and has Paul Greengrass making The Bourne Ultimatum as his followup to United 93. Old hand Campbell (returning to the series a decade after introducing Pierce Brosnan in Goldeneye) ensures, however, that Casino Royale seldom deviates from the tried-and-tested Bond formula: pretty girls, fast cars, conspicuous consumption, opportunistic stabs at topicality (Gunther Von Hagen! Airbus 380!! Parkour!!!), a few lamely witty one-liners, etc. It's as if the casting of blond, blunt Craig was such a massive gamble that in every other regard the instinct was to play things as safe as possible. The result: watchable but scarcely memorable, and surely unlikely to leave many viewers salivating over-hard for the 'Bond 22'. Perhaps they should rope in Dr Von Hagen for directorial chores next time - if only to acknowledge the way this particular franchise has been so glossily, lifelessly 'plastinated' for so long... Neil Young 6th December, 2006 CASINO ROYALE : [6/10] : USA (US-UK-Cz-Ger) 2006 : Martin CAMPBELL : 144 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Odeon cinema, MetroCentre, Gateshead (UK), 22nd November 2006 - press show 
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