King Kong returns: Daniel Craig is back to wreak havoc once more upon the legacy of the Bond franchise. By Lance Berry
Yes, I know...I did say that I'd never see another James Bond film as long as Daniel Craig was playing the role. But friends wanted to see this, peer pressure's a bitch, so what can you do?
You can stay away from Quantum of Solace, is what you can do.
... Yes, this isn't your father's James Bond...but since this is a reboot, then could we stop ripping off dad's Bond? A later scene where a female agent is killed by having her body filled with oil, and leaving her naked body face down on the bed and covered in the inky liquid isn't so much a homage to Goldfinger as it is a dead ripoff. Poor Jeffrey Wright(W., The Invasion) is suckered in once again to play CIA operative Felix Leiter, and again has next to nothing to do. What'll happen in the next film--will we have a large Asian man who throws a bowler hat, but instead of Oddjob, his name will be Dayjob?
..... And that is what the Bond franchise has become: a series desperately trying to reinvent itself as relevant in a Jason Bourne world, while clinging to fragments of its past as a safety blanket to appease older fans.
And in the end, this newly imagined world is definitely not enough.
The best thing about "Quantum of Solace"--the latest James Bond flick--is that the aptly-named villain-in-chief, Dominic Greene, is an environmentalist wacko, a "green" fanatic.
Still, the villain was boring. He doesn't compare to Blofeld (full name: Ernst Stavro Blofeld)--my favorite repeat Bond villain (best played by the late Telly Savalas)--or even Jaws. Not even close.
James Bond is supposed to be fun and casual--a hail fellow well met who is a good sport and doesn't take himself too seriously, even when he's getting the bad guys. But this movie was the exact opposite. It was smothered under the weight of seriousness, revenge themes, and bitterness. Don't get me wrong--I love revenge, a motive and response which is under-rated and over-panned. But I just didn't feel it here. It was empty and stupid.
I wasn't overly thrilled with Craig's debut in "Casino Royale", but I liked this one far less. I now have a better appreciation for "Royale", which really was far more Bondian in tradition, tempo, and demeanor. "Royale" had a discernible, plausible plot and heart-pounding action. This one had lots more action, but it was mostly dull and unexciting action, which left me cold. That's unless you count the scene of Bond repeatedly walking through massive flames of fire, unhurt. That's a "Come on?!" moment that's hard to believe. And while, yes, most Bond movies have stunts that are just not believable, the flamewalker stuff was just blatant in-your-face BS.
There was some great shooting and cool gun scenes. Love those guns--suave men with guns are hottt. But other than that, yaaawn.
And this one was missing even more of what Bond is all about and what makes male moviegoers want to be him and female movie fans want to "date" (euphemism) him: "shaken/not stirred" drinks, sexy women, and cool gadgets. Does our depressed economy translate into a shortage of all of those? Apparently so. While Ian Fleming's written-page Bond was actually not a womanizer, that's not the bachelor (except in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service") Bond we've come to know on-screen. But in "Quantum", Bond has only two women (who are strikingly flatter than General Motors' profits and the main course at IHOP). The cool gadgets? Well, there aren't any. Didn't you hear? Sharper Image went out of bid'ness. And the drinks? Well, "shaken, not stirred" is gone from the Bondian dialogue. I don't remember even hearing the "Bond, James Bond" line.
The one cool thing in the movie was ripped off from "Goldfinger". A Bond girl is found dead in Bond's hotel room covered in black oil. Remember the Bond girl found in a hotel room covered in gold paint? Been there, seen that.
Bottom line: The movie was entertaining and not objectionable. But it just wasn't what we expect from James Bond. Not only wasn't it a great Bond movie. It wasn't even an average one. It was just okay, and--as much as I hate to say it--in terms of a Bond movie, it was sort of mediocre. I love James Bond and James Bond movies. But I don't love "Quantum of Solace." It was just "eh".
Debbie Schlussel is a movie critic for the Sirius Patriot Channel and a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society. Click "Read More..." for the full review Discuss on our forum Read More...
I finally got around to watching Casino Royale a few days ago, having read and heard such rave reviews of both it and the 'new Bond' Daniel Craig, who I'd seen and liked in various television programmes. Now, I know how everyone is saying how good this film is, how Craig is the best Bond ever, yada yada yada, but I'm afraid that I have to come out well on the opposite side. I'm almost tempted to say that this is the worst Bond ever, both in terms of lead actor, plot, opening credits, song - just about everything.
Having spent a considerable amount of time over the years thinking and writing about the Bond legend, I don't mind admitting that I've had a devil of a time since this past November, trying to figure out exactly where Daniel Craig and Casino Royale fit into the almost mythical, iconic James Bond canon. Watching this supposedly radical revamped reboot of the franchise, there are so many instances of back-and-forth "yes, that's right," and "no, that's completely wrong," elements and sequences in the film, that by the end of its exhausting, too-long 144 minute running time, I wasn't exactly entertained as much as I was a nervous wreck. Unfortunately, deep flaws in the conception and execution of Casino Royale keep it from being one of the great works of the Bond filmography. .... The whole movie suffers this way, from a cramped, dark production design that imparts no awe or "gee whiz" appreciation that "Bond look" designer Ken Adam effortlessly achieved (quite a shock here, too, coming from long-time Bond production designer Peter Lamont). Bond is supposed to inhabit a world we will likely never see, a world of luxury that he's not really entitled to enter either, except for the fact that he has a license to kill that grants him entrance to these forbidden pockets of excess. So where is that sense of scope in Casino Royale? It's frankly an ugly film to look at, with little or no sense of style to its lensing or compositions. Again, one gets the feeling that everyone involved didn't want "pretty pictures," that those big sets were somehow artistically "dishonest" in a world that now sees Bond's exploits as outlandish actions that need an apology. What a shame. I'll take the "dishonesty" of Blofeld's volcano lair in You Only Live Twice any day over the depressing, dark, small look of Casino Royale.
CASINO ROYALE (or: A Bond movie that ISN’T a Bond movie…)
A strange thing happens at the end of this torture scene which I won’t reveal to you, just in case you choose to see this movie. It starts a major tilting of the plot, helps to set the love story in motion and begins a downward spiral of the movie’s entire internal logic. Trust me, nearly everything which happens due to the way the torture scene ends will leave you scratching your head about certain suddenly illogical plot points as you leave the theater. There are also several loose threads at the end, which is a cardinal rule no-no in a 007 film. Bond gets the bad guys, gets the girl in the end, case closed.
I know the new trend in films(especially intended or established series) is to leave the ending wide open so you’ll know a sequel is coming…it’s the Pavlovian way of training audiences to set aside money for down the road, so that like good little Borg drones, we’ll all march to the theater 2-3 years hence and dutifully turn over our hard-earned bucks to Big Brother studios. But this is one drone who’s slipped a digital track, ripped out his implants and refuses to conform to the collective consciousness that infests and infects the hive mind. Yes, Casino Royale was a decent movie...but it simply was not, on any level except within referencing the character’s name, a James Bond movie. And while I was able to set aside my misgivings in order to view Daniel Craig in a fair and balanced light, ultimately I find him to be sadly miscast. As long as he is Bond(and if Barbara Broccoli remains at the reins, he will be), I honestly do not see myself ever going to the theater to watch a James Bond movie again.
“Casino Royale”: An Obituary for The James Bond Film Franchise
· Daniel Craig (Bond). Craig’s characterization of Bond is charmless, worthless, and disturbingly nihilistic. At one point in the script, Craig’s Bond responds to a question with “Do I look like I give a damn?” The answer in “Casino Royale” is overwhelmingly NO. Why on earth, then, should the audience care about him? At another point, he tells Vesper “I have no idea what an honest job is.” Is this a credible (or creditable) moral statement to hear from a top-level government secret agent? Craig’s monotonously stoic performance is by no means compensated for by his (atrocious) line readings: he articulates rarely, mumbles often. As a result of Craig’s hollow Bond interpretation, what should have been the film’s ultimate impact moment—007’s “Bond, James Bond” confrontation with villainous Mr. White—is surprisingly anti-climactic, prompting a shrug rather than a cheer from this reviewer.
......
“Casino Royale” is the highest-grossing Bond film to date. But consider:
* This fact merely indicates the degree of public curiosity about or interest in James Bond and owes virtually everything to the franchise’s longstanding cinematic appeal and reputation (earned by much better films and performances in the series and betrayed dramatically by “Casino Royale”). * This fact confirms nothing about public satisfaction with or approval of this latest installment. * High box-office numbers neither reflect nor establish this film’s merit.
Bond is now played as what Britons would call a yobbo
Daniel Craig is no gentleman at all, only a half-civilized, arriviste thug, straight out of London gangland, if not Borstal itself. His motivation to rise in the ranks of MI6 to the point of becoming that organization’s most conspicuous and short-lived species of cannon fodder seems perfectly mysterious.
But it was depressing to see, fifty years on, just how much the world has grown stupider, shorter of attention span, less critical, and more vulgar. The hero of the mass audience is less the gentleman than ever, and James Bond is now played as what Britons would call a yobbo. I sometimes think that if we could live another century, we would see mankind reduced still further in grandeur and dignity, perhaps to some sort of quadruped.
I hate to buck the trend of those critics who are hailing the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, as a return to form and reinvention of the superhero spy franchise, but I found the film, while technically proficient, overlong and underwhelming. I’m personally disappointed too, being old enough to remember when a new James Bond film was one of the few reliable pleasures of escapist movie going.
A refreshingly honest review from a life long Bond fan, who wanted to like Craig in the role. After watching the film twice he made this cutting commentary.
Warning language used may be offensive to some. Zolly gives the official verdict on Casino Royale
The thing that makes this film dumb is that it's set in present day and Judi Dench once again stars as M, yet it follows Bond from his early days as he learns how to be 007. So essentially, the filmmakers are jettisoning the old Bond and recreating a new Bond so that they can continue the series without having to link this one to the past. Bond starts now.
So, among the non-Bond like things that happens is that Bond falls in love and gets all weepy and quits. Bond plays poker. Bond doesn't have any Bond lines. In fact, he asks for a martini at a bar, the bartender asks him "shaken or stirred?" and Bond replies, "Do I look like I care?" This is definitely a Bond for a new era. His catch phrase is now "do I look like I care?" I'm sure teenagers all over the world will love him.
Now, in "Casino Royale," the thuggish-looking British actor Daniel Craig (the blond Mossad agent in Steven Spielberg's "Munich") plays Bond as a humorless brute with a flat, classless Estuary English accent, and the critics (other than this one) are going wild.
Bond is supposed to be tall, dark, and handsome, but Craig is none of those, so there was much concern among fans. The filmmakers have dyed his hair light brown, however, so the audience's usual unconscious color prejudice -- in movies, blond is for leading ladies, not action heroes -- is muted.
While Craig is certainly intense, his dry ice approach suits a film shorter than 144 minutes. "Casino Royale" is mediocre in execution and bloated in conception, wrapping the usual elephantine Bond movie mechanics around Fleming's minimal plot (in the book, Bond doesn't even get to kill anybody
Well here we are with Casino Royale and Purvis and Wade are still with us and uber-hack Martin Campbell is at the helm. And instead of making a better James Bond film the producers were determined to milk the success of the Bourne films and Batman Begins and entirely deconstruct the franchise. This is certainly not what the franchise needed. The James Bond franchise does not need tinkering. It certainly does not need rebooting. The formula is full-proof and has been for forty years. What it needed was better writers and directors (and it would also seem better producers). So what do you get when you take all the wit, charm, fun and character out of a Bond film? You get a fairly substandard and quite boring action film that could be Die Hard IV if you change the name of the main character.
Ratings for the new James Bond: Casino Royale are through the roof. Every review site on the internet is hailing it as the best Bond movie yet. I love James Bond, but I HATED Casino Royale.
And another thing, Daniel Craig does not look the part of a smooth super-spy. Throughout the entire movie, that kept nagging at me in the back of my mind… he doesn’t look the part. Absolutely horrible casting.
Well, I finally saw Casino Royale last night, and came away thinking my colleague, Cosmo (Landesman) got it absolutely right in his review:
"The film aims to be a character-driven study of how 007 was changed by this mission and meeting Vesper. But as far as I can tell, it’s the story of how a sadistic psycho who hated women became a better-dressed and more professional sadistic psycho who hates women."
Now comes Daniel Craig, a casting decision that was at first raked over the coals and is now nearly universally praised. Is he the Bond we've been waiting for?
Yes and no. Given the confines of the script, Craig plays the role with pitch perfect precision -- temperamental, stubborn, crazed and dangerous. The producers, though, have taken the wrong path in their Bond make-over, and forgotten the primary reason why the character is so appealing to men and women: Bond is a fantasy image for both sexes. Like any fantasy, we like him with a healthy dose of not only cunning brutism, but a sense of fun and mischief as well. That's what Craig, and Casino Royale, sorely lacks.
Yet another *sigh* underachieving screenplay and mediocre direction, overly long, boring and unsatisfying Gee, what a disappointment. I was thrilled to watch this one approach release and even more thrilled to see the almost universal critical acclaim that Casino Royale '06 garnered. I guess I should have stayed home. No. I m glad I made the effort to sit through it - and that really was an effort and a tribute to my love for the genre, what might have been, and what we might hope for in the future.
In ``Casino Royale,'' James Bond's boss, M, played by Dame Judi Dench, excoriates him for botching a job, snapping, ``Any thug can kill people.''
And any thug can be a witless boozer.
Author Ian Fleming's suave British secret agent has turned into a muscled killer in this new movie. Played by Daniel Craig, he's ill-suited to witty repartee and rather dismissive about what he eats and drinks.
Fleming's 007 was a man of very personal tastes in food and wine. ``I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink,'' he says in Fleming's first Bond novel, ``Casino Royale'' (1953). ``It comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details. It's very persnickety and old-maidish...''
The important thing to remember is this: James Bond was not a lithe, "pantherlike" superhero. He was, in the words of Anthony Burgess, a "globetrotting clubman," who looked more comfortable at a dinner table than in a gym. In just about every novel Fleming took pains to emphasize this fact, juxtaposing him with a variety of dominating physical specimens: Oddjob, Donovan Grant, Scaramanga, the 7-foot-tall Dr. No. In each case he won by cunning and guile, not brute force. He was a good shot, true, and he was lucky, but his victories were due more to what the British would call "pluck" than they were to any physical preeminence. In the tradition of British heroism, he was a gentleman who, by dint of breeding, bearing and a stiff upper lip (and, truth be told, conniving and subterfuge when necessary), somehow managed to muddle through to victory.
Dana Stevens says that the point of casting Craig was to "subvert the Bond brand." That's kind of sad, because the Bond brand, as has been represented in film thus far, has never been anything but a subversion.
I'm not that gung-ho on the film after finally seeing it
I suppose I better get this out of the way first: I wasn't as enamored with this Bond entry as many others that I have spoken to about it. I even had one friend say "Daniel Craig is better than Connery!" -- please. I suppose his muscle-bound physique, and the ludicrous plot details, match perfectly for today's audiences. Seems even after our hero has a near fatal heart attack he is immediately back chasing cars at breakneck speed ala The Six Million Dollar Man. With Texas hold'em so popular these days I suppose it was another 'improved' bastardization of the Fleming novel - lucky for us skateboarding, or better yet apple-pie-eating contests, aren't the current flavor of the month. Hollywood might have found some way to mesh them in.... quite acceptably, of course. Heaven forbid we remove all the cell-phone gadgetry and set the film 35 years ago.
So why isn't Casino Royale the greatest Bond film ever? After all, we have a new Bond in Daniel Craig, and other critics have been giving him rave reviews. Furthermore, the film starts off with a very vintage Bond look as shots are devoid of color and camera angles are taken from extreme angles. Unfortunately, this unique film style only lasts for a few minutes and then we go back to boring, cookie-cutter movie. This really disappointed me right off the bat, and I'll give you three more reasons why Casino Royale does not live up to its potential...
1. Craig looks out of place and uncomfortable in a tuxedo 2. Craig's straight-faced performance makes it impossible for us to discern his feelings and therefore impossible to empathize with him as the protagonist 3. the majority of the film consists of an extremely boring Texas Hold 'Em game
The James Bond character is essentially three things: fearless, a ladies' man, and sophisticated. Daniel Craig does a decent job of not looking scared on film, and he is seen rolling around with more than one woman on screen. Unfortunately however, he looks so uncomfortable when he gets dressed up. He looks like a beer delivery guy who was forced to put on a tuxedo because his mommy told him to and he can't wait to take it back off and change into his play clothes.
When Daniel Craig was announced as the new James Bond last year, the 007 faithful over in Britain got their knickers into quite a twist.
They bellyached that the actor was too much of a thug, his hair and eye color weren't right for Bond, and that he didn't even know how to drive a stick shift. You'd think they hired Daniel DeVito instead of Daniel Craig for all the heat the guy took.
Then when "Casino Royale" finally came out, they were just as extreme in the opposite direction, saying that Craig was the best Bond since Sean Connery, that they were finally freed from the smirking, cocked eyebrow one liners of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan, and finally, that "Casino Royale" was the best Bond in decades.
Well, after seeing the movie, I'm inclined to say the truth is something inbetween the haters and the fawners. Craig is fine and "Casino Royale" is solid enough, but well, I still miss Connery and Moore.
I can find one nice thing to say about Casino Royale--maybe two. Daniel Craig is not bad. He’s fine, actually. He’s not playing James Bond--
I guess I can’t escape the performances. Eva Green is awful, Mads Mikkelsen is amusingly awful, and Jeffrey Wright is unspeakably bad. It’s a new level of terrible from Wright, who manages to give the same performance over and over again, but worse each time...
The writing is something special. It manages to bore to new heights. James Bond isn’t the film’s central character for much of the film, he’s the subject, which is not a working arrangement for something known as a James Bond film...
James Bond films have always been well-reviewed, at least since I’ve known about movie reviews. The distaste for them comes later--I remember Dalton being well-reviewed for example and there were astoundingly positive reviews for the worst of the Brosnan films. I didn’t to go Casino Royale hoping it would suck so I could be bemused at the state of artistic appreciation in the world today. I went to be amused by stunts and explosions and I didn’t even get those.
Aside from how brutishly, gremlin-ugly Daniel Craig is
Michelle and I watched Casino Royale last night. Aside from how brutishly, gremlin-ugly Daniel Craig is, the thing that was the biggest barrier to enjoying it were the long, ultra-choreographed fight scenes
Simply giving a guy a big gun, an Aston Martin and Dench as his boss doesn’t make him James Bond.
Simply giving a guy a big gun, an Aston Martin and Dame Judi Dench as his boss doesn’t make him James Bond.
I’m in the minority here I know, but I didn’t like it. I’m a Bond fan. I’ve seen all the movies many times, and I’ve read all the books many times and I consider myself a Bond aficionado – and I didn’t like it. There are things Bond, and Bond movies, must have and do to be Bond, and this guy, and this movie, just hasn’t got any of them.
As to Bond himself, Daniel Craig, no matter how gifted an actor, is NOT Bond. The character is clearly defined and described in the books, and Craig just does not fit in any respect. The obvious starter is the fact that Bond as described is definitely not blonde. He certainly doesn’t look like an ex-boxer. So, is this ‘Ian Fleming’s James Bond’ as claimed in the credits, or is it now ‘Micheal G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli’s James Bond’? Also this is supposed to be a younger Bond at the beginning of his 00 career. Can any of you really tell me that Craig looks appreciably younger than Brosnan?
Craig’s character, and I mean that quite pointedly, states at the end of the movie that ‘The name’s Bond. James Bond’. Well, sorry, but no it isn’t. It could be anybody.
