SKYFALL: So Much For My Promising Career in Espionage

Skyfall (2012) – The 23rd James Bond Film; the 3rd Daniel Craig Film – Directed by Sam Mendes – Starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Bérénice Lim Marlohe, Ben Whishaw, Rory Kinnear, and Albert Finney.

If you’re new here, be aware that SPOILERS are coming. Lots of them. I am not bound by your inability to have seen the movie before me. I’ve seen it and I want to talk about it, so if you don’t want anything ruined, go away, see the movie, and then come back and tell me why I’m an idiot. If you’re looking for the answer to the question, “Should I see it?”, the answer is Yes. If you really want to read about Bond, though, I’ve reviewed the other Bond movies, which you can find right here at the James Bond Review Index.

Whenever a new story in a long-running series comes out, there’s this immediate, infantile urge to locate the story’s place in the greater scheme: Best Bond film ever! Worse than Quantum of Snoozefest! Not as good as Octopussy but better than Die Another Day/!

These kinds of comments and lists are ridiculously tiresome. It’s like people are out there waiting for an opportunity to update a list rather than watch a movie. I think they are generally created by people who can’t prove their better than you by buying a Ferrari so they try to shame you with knowledge, or who have perhaps mistaken their fandom for identity and fear new fans enjoying what they’ve been enjoying and thus, the argument goes, somehow ruining it. (I thought this way, too, once. Of course, I was fifteen.) If people have fun with them, that’s fine, but if they’re using it to make you feel dumb, then I hope they sit next to the loudest, dumbest fourteen year old the next time they go to the theater. Why? Because it will be like they’re sitting next to themselves, that’s why.

What irks me the most about them, however, is that the idea of accurately comparing the immediate experience of watching a film in the theater with films that have been around for decades.

No, I take that back. What irks me the most is the person who doesn’t have fun with their lists, who uses the creation of a list or the comparison of one film to another in the series simply as an opportunity to toss some predictable, tired snark around.

I bring all of this up, in part, as a way to call myself out. (What? You thought that I thought I was perfect? You really are new here.) While watching SKYFALL this afternoon in a very crowded theater on the 23rd Bond film’s third day of release, I found myself occasionally thinking of where I’d place SKYFALL in the Bond pantheon. Instead of, you know, simply enjoying and analyzing the movie on its own merits. If you’ve kicked around the Anxiety, at all, you know I hate lists. I think once you get past a few movies, trying to argue that, say, the 14th best Bond movie is better than the 15th best Bond movie is a little specious. I prefer to do my rankings using the tier system; it’s more general, but for me, at least, it’s more accurate. I can make a very convincing argument that CASINO ROYALE (2006) is the best Bond movie ever, but I can also make a convincing argument that GOLDFINGER is the best Bond movie ever, too.

The truth is that sometimes I think ROYALE is the best and at other times I think GOLDFINGER is the best, so I’m content to call them “Tier One” movies and leave it at that.

Is SKYFALL a Tier One Bond movie?

Yes. Probably. Talk to me after the Blu-ray comes out and I’ve seen it a few more times. That snarky comment that kept rattling around my brain during the film was, “This is good, but it’s not CASINO ROYALE good.” For now, I’m confident in saying that it’s not nearly as good as CASINO ROYALE, but then, I consider CASINO ROYALE the single best action movie since Die Hard. I am happy to say that it was worth every penny of the $9 I would have paid if I had paid for my ticket this afternoon. It’s a mature, serious espionage film, dotted with brief moments of wry humor. It’s well-written, well-acted, and well-directed, although on this last point it must be noted that Sam Mendes’ action scenes succeed because of their narrative strength and not because of their visual flair.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and it shows how smart a director Mendes is to play to his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. It also gives SKYFALL a uniqueness to it; there’s a very real sense throughout the movie that SKYFALL is raising the bar and making a real attempt to push action movies in a different direction.

Which is to say, it’s not a Jason Bourne movie. In fact, SKYFALL owes more (visually and narratively) to Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire than any of the Bourne movies, or even many of the Bond movies.

Sure, there’s the tired, seen-too-many-times “Bond is getting old” trope trotted out one more time, and when SKYFALL is at its worst it’s indulging in this nonsense. (Which is really silly considering that ROYALE and QUANTUM OF SOLACE were the start of Bond’s career and they happened one immediately after the other.) James Bond is such the epitome of cool that giving him physical frailty is the easiest way to put a dent in his armor, but I feel about this plot the way I feel about superheroes who don’t want to be superheroes: this isn’t why you’re getting my money. It’s harder, but much more satisfying, when Bond films find other ways to give our supercool British spy a hurdle to overcome. Give them a love interest. Give them a personal vendetta. Give them Christopher Lee.

Thankfully, SKYFALL offers a bit of this, too. While it opens with Bond getting accidentally shot off a moving train by another British agent (Naomie Harris’ Eve Moneypenny, though the film doesn’t tell us her name until the end), only to come back a few months later looking haunted and beaten down, SKYFALL eventually moves us to Bond’s family home (named Skyfall) in Scotland. SKYFALL starts in the present with the damaged Bond, but then once he returns to active field duty, the rest of the film is a balance between who he (and the franchise) used to be and who he (and the franchise) is going to be.

That’s not unintentional, of course. This is the 50th year anniversary of the James Bond cinematic franchise, which makes it a fitting time to reflect and redefine.

On that note, it’s both satisfying and a bit disappointing that the answer to where Bond is going is back to tradition. By the end of the film, M (Judi Dench) is dead, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) is the new M, and we’ve been introduced to a new Q (Ben Whishaw) and Miss Moneypenny (Naomie Harris). The film tries to hold off on the new M and Moneypenny until the end, but given that we don’t hear Moneypenny’s name at the start and all of her dialogue with Bond centers around her maybe not being best suited for field duty, it’s pretty obvious where that plot is going. Similarly, the film introduces the idea that M is going to be forced to step aside and it’s pretty obvious that if she is going to be replaced, Ralph Fiennes is going to be her replacement.

It’s not just the reinstatement of Q and Moneypenny to the franchise, but the whole office set-up that played such a huge role in the pre-Craig era. As SKYFALL is closing, there’s Bond coming through a door, Miss Moneypenny taking her seat at a desk, and Bond entering a small but rich office where he takes a mission from M. Mendes makes these moments work, and it’s a confident shot at other movie franchises. Any franchise that survives for 50 years is going to have a certain amount of malleability to it, and that’s clearly in evidence over the course of Bond’s run. Sean Connery exchanged confidence for parody. Roger Moore went to space. Timothy Dalton made a Schwarzenegger film. Pierce Brosnan oversaw the rise of female equality. And Daniel Craig wasn’t allowed to smile.

None of that is, in and of itself, automatically a bad thing. Malleability is a good thing, in the long run, because it gets the franchise through the years where it has fallen a bit out of favor, and then every so often we’re rewarded with a SPY WHO LOVED ME or GOLDENEYE or SKYFALL that reasserts the franchise’s preeminence.

And that’s really SKYFALL’s biggest strength – this is a movie that does what it does without concern for the latest cinematic trends. SKYFALL is a movie that charts its own course, that’s respective of the past and cognizant of the future. When Bond exchanges M’s Jaguar for his original Aston Martin DB5, it’s not just symbolically cool to see Connery’s car back, but an assertion of the confident style that Bond represents. Far too often over the years the Bond franchise has been the Ford Mustang; no, not the pre-1970s Mustang which was as cool as any car ever, but all of those post-First Generation Mustangs where Ford ripped the guts out of their Pony Car and continually morphed it into whatever the populace was buying at the moment. The Mustang should always be THE MUSTANG. Other car manufacturers should change to rip it off but instead we’ve gotten nearly forty years of the Mustang trying to be the Toyota Celica or Mazda Rx-Whatever or Dodge Charger.

I like QUANTUM OF SOLACE more than just about anyone, but it’s not a traditional Bond movie. It’s a great action movie, but it’s far more Bourne than Bond. It took the grim Craig Bond one step too far into the darkness, and while that isn’t ideal, the reaction has been to bring Bond back into the light with SKYFALL. The care and attention here to not only make a great movie, but to make the reset to a Bond tied to an M, a Q, and a Moneypenny happen organically. In the long history of the Bond franchise, SKYFALL represents a high point in terms of seeing a long-term plan. That’s what I thought was going to happen with ROYALE, but then QUANTUM took a awkward step and financial troubles befell MGM, and so SKYFALL feels like another new beginning. Because of what ROYALE didn’t do (no Q, no Moneypenny, very little sense of humor), SKYFALL took the opportunity to re-establish some old friends and it does it beautifully.

There’s no doubting I left the theater with a smile on my face, but it’s not simply because SKYFALL takes what is old and makes it new, again. No, what makes all of this work is that the mission in SKYFALL brings Bond, old M, new M, Q, and Moneypenny together through the test of battle. Because of the personal attack on M and MI6 by Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) and British politicians, we see our new unit coming together organically. Yes, we get the r-establishment of the lovably contentious Bond/Q relationship, but it’s in the process of Q having to prove himself to Bond when 007 steals M away in order to hide her that his inclusion wins me over.

People have been raving about Javier Bardem’s Silva, and it’s a good performance, but it’s yet another former ally turned enemy plot, and there’s really not a lot here that’s better than Sean Bean’s role as 006. The opening confrontation between Silva and Bond is very strong, but Silva quickly becomes just another thug with a gun and an axe to grind.

Daniel Craig is once again very good as James Bond and SKYFALL is a very good movie. Mendes manages to make an excellent spy film that brings back some of the old James Bond elements that had grown stale and rightly been abandoned. He infuses a grown-up espionage film with plenty of nods to Bond’s past and as the curtain falls on Bond’s 23rd movie and 50th year, Mendes puts all the toys back on the board, setting up the movie franchise for it’s next stage. When M is sitting in front of the government inquisition and a politician is telling her how MI6 is outdated and she’s outdated and blah blah blah, it’s not just a story point but a subtle shot at the changing trends. M’s response, Bond’s response, even Mallory, Q, and Moneypenny’s response is a come back to Jesus moment, welcoming old fans back to a more traditional Bond at the same time it lets us know what the new ground rules are going to be.

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Check out my latest work of fiction, with a time-traveling British secret agent: GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC VOLUME 0: BLOOD OF THE UNIVERSE. Here’s the blurb: It’s 1866 and Jill (a white, merchant’s daughter) and Hanna (a Korean-American servant in the merchant’s house) have fled to the American West to start a new life on their own terms.
They boarded a train in Kansas City, and before the morning was over, they had fought werewolves and vampires, partnered with Bellingham, a time-traveling British secret agent, and made an enemy of Mrs. Lincoln.

And then the train jumped its tracks, crashing violently, and killing Jill.

Hanna is despondent until Bellingham reveals his real reason for being in 1866: the Universe Cutter, a knife with the power to resurrect the dead. All they have to do is find it.

To bring Jill back, Hanna will partner with two time travelers and President Grant’s right-hand man, and battle Confederates, werewolves, lizard men, sun worshipping cultists, and a man from the end of time. All for a chance to bring back the woman she loves … a woman who will never love her back.

GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC VOL. 0: BLOOD OF THE UNIVERSE also features the back-up tale, “Appetite for Appeasement,” starring Bellingham.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE: I Don’t Think the Dead Care About Vengeance

Quantum of Solace – The 22nd James Bond Film; The 2nd Daniel Craig Film – Directed by Marc Forster – Starring Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, Stana Katic, and Judi Dench.

Inevitably, if you watch or read a long series – whether it’s James Bond or Doctor Who or The Mighty Thor – you’re going to end up defending a mediocre story a little too hard. I’m not talking about playing the “I know it’s awful but it’s awesomely awful” or even the “guilty pleasure” card, but a regular 2- or 2.5-star story that you defend a little harder than anyone else and attempt to convince everyone it’s really a 4-star story.

Such is QUANTUM OF SOLACE. I really like this movie. Is it as good as CASINO ROYALE? Hell no, but QUANTUM is an incredibly watchable movie that offers a short, fast action flick with minimal characterization. And that’s the main problem with the film. After all of that wonderful character development last time and the big, sweeping story, QUANTUM OF SOLACE could easily be the latest XXX or Jason Bourne film, or what a Jason Statham film would look like with a budget. After a bit, all that action gets a little tedious because there’s not much of a connection to what’s going on – it’s just Bond fighting faceless people.

I get that I like this film more than most. From the moment I walked out of the theater, I’ve heard plenty of arguments telling me I’m soft in the head. I understand the flaws in the movie, but … I still love popping the movie in the DVD player and watching 106 minutes of sharply-filmed, beautifully-choreographed, full throttle action.

Where CASINO ROYALE made a point to take away some of Bond’s formulaic toys, QUANTUM goes a step further and strips Bond down to an instrument of revenge. Where CASINO saw a finer balance between Bond the Bulldog and Bond the Man, QUANTUM is far less interested in the man and far more interested in the bulldog. From the opening scene, QUANTUM is rush, rush, rush forward, and I can understand why this drives some people nuts.

But.

It makes sense. For me, it’s nice to see Bond still dealing with the events of the last film, though it takes the film sharply away from the fantasy and towards a more realistic approach. (Realistic being a relative term in the Bond universe.) Bond films usually just drop us into a new 2-hour, mostly self-contained fantasy and here’s QUANTUM still dealing with what happened last movie. Personally, I like it. I wouldn’t want to see it every time out, but I think the action scenes are spectacular (even if Forster keeps his camera a bit too close) and the idea of a driven Bond who’s working through his grief by refusing to work through his grief is an interesting take on the character.

The other reason I have a fondness for this movie is that the most important relationship in this movie is between Bond and M (Daniel Craig and Judi Dench). Increasingly during her tenure as M, the filmmakers have endeavored to give Judi Dench more to do than the typical early-in-the-movie briefing and end-of-movie reprise. It’s a smart move because it’s, you know, Judi Dench. This is the clearly the most extensive use of M, however, and she’s completely integrated into the movie. I love seeing an active M, one who manages her agents instead of simply handing them a file and then sending them out into the world. Bond’s actions have consequence and M is caught between defending him, handling him, turning him loose, and cleaning up his mess.

The action sequences in QUANTUM are brutal and energetic. As I mentioned up above, Forster keeps his camera a little too close to the action and at times it’s hard to follow the exact details of what’s going on but on the whole these action sequences move as well as any action sequence you’ll find anywhere. The opening car chase is fantastic, the foot chase is fantastic, the boat chase is solid, and the finale … well, that’s a bit of a letdown. The problem with the finale is that Bond’s mission to stop Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) is far less impressive or emotional than Camille’s battle against General Medrano (Joaquín Cosío), so we get Bond running around as the hotel burns and fighting a guy he could destroy even if the other guy has an axe. Which he does.

Camille (Olga Kurylenko) also signifies a change in the Bond formula. Where every other film would end with Bond and Camille bedding down in some silly location and grinning deliciously at each other, here there’s a hard, quick kiss in a car and then Camille gets out and Bond moves on. “I don’t think the dead care about vengeance,” Bond tells her before parting. Which means revenge is for the living. Great. I just wish the film would have done a bit more with that.

The woman Bond sleeps with in QUANTUM is Miss Fields (first name Strawberry, but it’s never mentioned until the credits – another sign of the new, ultra-serious approach), played by Gemma Arterton. Fields is stationed at the British Consulate in Bolivia and is given the task of putting the renegade Bond on a plane back to England.

Right.

Of course, let’s send the young, beautiful desk jockey to bring 007 in. That’s a great plan.

It’s such a colossally dumb move that you wish the film would’ve made it obvious that M purposely sent Fields to Bond as some kind of test – was he so far gone and so focused on getting revenge for Vesper that he’d ignore the opportunity to seduce the beautiful Miss Fields? Or perhaps seducing her would dull his edge enough to get him to realize he needs to come in?

There’s precious little foreplay which serves only to remind you that the film is dreadfully short on all of those wonderful character bits that were sprinkled throughout CASINO. It would be silly for a repeat of the Vesper/Bond romance, but Fields is a nice character and it’s a shame that the film didn’t develop her. When she goes to check Bond into a crummy hotel, he says simply, “No.”

“It fits our cover,” she tells him. “We’re teachers.”

“I’d rather sleep in the morgue,” Bond shoots back and you just wish the film would’ve lightened up a bit because Craig is very good at delivering these gruff-but-boyish lines. When he takes her to a luxurious hotel he checks in by telling the desk clerk, “We’re teachers. Who just won the lottery.” It’s funny, but it’s funny because he’s so grimly serious about it.

Bond’s seduction of Fields is cold and proves Vesper’s CASINO accusation of Bond viewing women as disposable commodities. Entering the suit he quickly dismisses the hotel employee, tosses his keys aside, and moves right to the bedroom. “I can’t find the, um, stationary,” he says from inside the bedroom. “Care to help me?”

Fields, of course, joins him and then hates herself afterwards, but there’s a real spark of chemistry here between them. When Bond asks her if she wants to go to a party, she eagerly joins in on the mission, even tripping up Greene’s henchman. Bond leaves the party with Camille and the next time we see Fields she’s dead, drowned in oil. M is furious, accusing him of doing exactly what she must have known he would do, and Bond comes to Fields’ defense, telling M she died bravely and to make sure her report reflected that.

In the pre-Craig days, the Fields character might well have been the “good” Bond girl to Camille’s “bad” Bond girl, but the Craig era is so determined to not be trapped by the old way of doing things that they sometimes let a good opportunity go right past them.

At the end of the film, he goes after Vesper’s Quantum agent boyfriend. He’s got his new mark, a hottie from Canadian Intelligence (Stana Katic) and Bond dismisses her, telling her to go back and plug their leak. She’s got the exact same necklace that Vesper had, which is a bit silly, but whatever. Bond aims his gun, and …

We cut to outside where he tells M he didn’t kill the guy because he’s learned his lesson.

I really like the movie, but I know I’m in the minority. I think there’s some real character moments but they’re buried under a lot of really impressive slam-bang-boom action. The movie is decidedly shorter than CASINO (by almost 40 minutes) so it’s not like they didn’t have room to slow things down and let the film breathe. What’s here is a very good action film, though. The sequence at the opera where Bond listens in on Quantum’s private conversation is very well done but the new “high tech” MI6 command central is a bit too much. We just don’t need it to be all flashy, but it’s like Forster is so afraid to have a calm moment that he gives us some fireworks even when the scene doesn’t need them.

Here’s hoping Bond 23 lightens the mood a little.

CASINO ROYALE (2006): The World’s Gonna Know You Died Scratching My Balls

Casino Royale (2006) – The 21st James Bond Film; The 1st Daniel Craig Film – Directed by Martin Campbell – Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Giancarlo Giannini, Jeffrey Wright, Simon Abkarian, Jesper Christensen, and Judi Dench.

When I first watched CASINO ROYALE back in 2006, the first thing I said to someone about the movie was, “That’s the Bond movie I’ve always wanted to see.” Combining a global plot with an intimate character arc, CASINO reboots the Bond franchise by taking us back to the first days of James Bond (Daniel Craig) as 007. Largely gone are the gadgets, Moneypenny, Q, shaken-not-stirred, the signature theme music, the ridiculous henchman, the comedic ally, and the Hollywood-ized casting that came to the fore in the Pierce Brosnan films. In it’s place we have a straightforward action/espionage film with a villain whose interest lies in making money far more than ruling the world.

And it’s brilliant.

CASINO ROYALE is not only my favorite James Bond film, not only in the pantheon of all-time action movies, but it’s also flat out one of my favorite movies of all time.

Clocking in at almost two-and-a-half hours, CASINO ROYALE manages to tell a large story without losing sight of the character arc of its protagonist. This is the first Bond film with a Bond still finding himself as a man and an agent. While he’s still cool, he’s not unflappable. He makes mistakes but he doggedly keeps pushing forward. He is very much the “blunt instrument” that M accuses him of being while dressing him down for an act that causes the British government public discomfort.

The movie opens in black and white, as we see Bond waiting for Dryden, an MI6 section chief in his office. Dryden tells Bond he isn’t worried because Bond doesn’t have “double-O” status because you need two confirmed kills to gain it. Intercut with the Dryden-Bond showdown is an incredibly physical fight between Bond and Dryden’s contact in a bathroom. Bond kills the contact for kill #1 and then Dryden for kill #2. Smartly, the film moves from the assasination of Dryden, back to the final killshot of his contact, which becomes the famous “barrel sequence,” then we’re into the titles, and when we come out the other side, we see a computer screen telling us that he’s “007 status confirmed.” It’s smart filmmaking that rewards you for paying attention. This isn’t to suggest that CASINO ROYALE is Memento or Mulholland Drive, but it will reward you for paying attention to the craft that went into its production.

When we next see Bond, he’s in Madagascar and working with a much greener agent to capture a bomb maker. We get this huge parkour chase sequence (with the bomb maker being played by Sebastian Foucan, one of parkour’s founders) through the city that winds through a construction site and ends at the Nambutu foreign embassy. It’s a fantastic sequence that highlights the raw physicality of Craig’s Bond. His target runs over obstacles and squeezes through tiny holes while Bond runs through them, combining his power with his intelligence to continually close the distance on the target. At the embassy we see that his intelligence has limits; far from being invincible, Craig’s Bond makes plenty of mistakes, like he does at the end of the sequence when he kills the bomb maker inside embassy grounds and in plain sight of a security camera.

The Brosnan Bond films did a solid job of plugging the Bond franchise into the contemporary political scene and CASINO continues this trend. Bond’s killing of the bomb maker causes all sorts of grief for M (still played by the awesomely bad-ass Judi Dench) as his assassination makes the papers back home. M is furious at the duplicitous nature of the lawmakers who want results and purposely don’t ask about their methods, and furious at Bond for being so stupid.

The relationship between M and Bond is different than it’s ever been this time around. With Brosnan’s Bond, Dench’s M was also a bad-ass, but there was always the sense that, relative to their fields, they were both at the top of their profession. Dench’s M actually has to prove herself to Bond in GOLDENEYE but this becomes mutual respect as the series progresses. In CASINO, M is clearly the superior, and her admonishing of Bond is much more … I hesitate to use the word “maternal” because I think I want to use it just because M’s a woman and Bond’s a man, but her attitude towards Bond is one-part taskmaster, one-part shepherd. “They want your head,” she tells him sternly. “I’m considering giving it to them.”

“Next time I’ll shoot the camera first,” he tells her flatly. You can forget, I think, just how humorous CASINO can occasionally be if you haven’t watched it in a while because the film, as a whole, is so serious. Craig’s usually delivers his quips in a serious monotone, which helps to keep the film and character grounded.

M wants Bond to see “the big picture” in light of his actions in Madagascar but at the end of the film, after Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) is dead and Bond coldly tells M he doesn’t need anymore time off because “the mission is over and the bitch is dead,” you can see a look on M’s face that says she’s a bit wary of what she’s just created.

CASINO plays with your expectations of what a Bond movie “should be” a bit here and there, both for comedic effect and to highlight how this film is going in a new direction. When Bond first meets Vesper, she tells him, “I’m the money” and he dryly replies that she’s “worth every penny of it.” Later, when a bartender asks him if he wants his martini “shaken or stirred,” Bond angrily snaps back, “Does it look like I give a damn?”

The main storyline in CASINO involves Bond playing in a high stakes poker game that bad guy Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) puts on to recover the money he lost when Bond stopped his agent from blowing up a jet in Miami. Le Chiffre short sells stocks and then hires people to do bad things to profit from rebuying the stock at a much lower price. When Bond stops the bomb, the shares of the jet’s manufacturer don’t fall, and Le Chiffre ends up being out $100 million. Give or take. The poker game is his chance to make his money back.

The problem with his scheme is that he’s investing other people’s money, and that’s where the real problem for him lies. He takes money from international terrorists and invests it and they’re understandably torqued when Le Chiffre’s “low risk” investing strategies cost them their money. A bunch of African terrorists show up in Montenegro to rough him up a bit and Bond ends up killing them when they recognize him as a threat. The fight between the men and Bond (with Vesper caught in the middle) is another rough, physical, brutal fight down a stairwell inside the casino. Bond kills both terrorists but the fight takes his toll on him. Where a previous Bond might be bothered most by the blood on his clothes, Craig’s Bond clearly needs time to come down from what he’s just done. Guzzling liquor as he undresses back in his room, Bond needs time to compose himself before returning to the table to continue the game.

Moving parallel to the poker game plot is Bond’s developing relationship with Vesper, an agent from the Treasury who’s been assigned to the mission. She’s authorized $10 million to go into Bond’s account for the poker game buy-in and she can authorize $5 million more if she deems it a wise investment. Craig and Eva Green have fantastic chemistry. The dinner scene aboard a high-speed luxury train is one of the best back-and-forths in the franchise. There’s a mutual attraction between them but Lynd makes a point to tell Bond that this will be a business trip. After they pop-psychoanalyze each other, Lynd asks him, “How was your lamb?”

“Skewered,” he answers with a droll smile.

Vesper ends up betraying Bond in the end. She’s a double agent, working for the organization that employs Le Chiffre. Her boyfriend was held hostage by the group and they coerced her into working for them to get the money. What’s nice is that because Lynd isn’t a professional at all of this, her tears are real when she sees Bond kill the two African terrorists. The filmmakers have managed to make all of her actions consistent with both her growing attraction to Bond and her ultimate betrayal. It’s a quiet but powerful performance by Green, and the relationship between Vesper and Bond grows naturally through the film so you feel her betrayal all the more when it comes (even if you know it’s probably coming).

At the helm for the first time since GOLDENEYE is Martin Campbell and once again he delivers stellar work. It’s top notch directing from start to finish from Campbell.

David Arnold is back to score his fourth straight Bond movie and once again he’s fantastic, too. He’s hamstrung a bit by the decision to not use the classic Bond theme until the end credits, but he co-wrote the title song, “You Know My Name” with Chris Cornell and uses an orchestrated version of the song throughout the film to serve as a substitute theme for Bond. It works extremely well and sounds reminiscent enough of the classic Bond theme that, unlike GOLDENEYE, you’re not constantly waiting for it to show up. It’s a great rock song, too, and the opening titles (designed by Daniel Kleinman) are spectacular. I love the colorful brightness of the sequence, which stand in contrast to the film’s muted (though well-lit) palette. Both song and title sequence are among the best in the franchise’s history.

CASINO ROYALE is a triumph from start to finish.