Casino Royale: Movie Review

Yes, I just got around to seeing Casino Royale, with Daniel Craig as the new James Bond.

It may illustrate why the country is now going to be governed by Barack "World" Obama, Nancy "Total Failure" Pelosi, and Harry "Dirty Oil" Reid that this movie received high marks from those who rated it on Internet Movie Database (Imndb.com). It is not a good movie.

The movie industry has simply forgotten how to make fun movies. Daniel Craig makes a dour, sullen Bond. Sure, the Roger Moore Bond movies tended to skew toward cartoon fantasy, but most were fun to watch. Sean Connery, who played Bond somewhere between the tongue-way-in-the-cheek Moore and the dour, athletic Craig, remains the best Bond. Nevertheless, the Moore movies had a lot of fantasy charm, even if reality was left far behind.

With "Casino Royale, we leave fun fantasy far behind in favor of pseudo grit and grimness. Yes, we are in Jon le Carre territory, where spying is a dirty, cynical game dominated by cynical characters in suits. Betrayal is the name of the game, and no one really believes in anything.

I never really warmed to John le Carre, even if he writes on an entirely different (higher) level than "Casino Royale". I believe le Carre's view of the spy game is, in its way, as much fantasy as the Moore Bond movies. Oh, I am sure real spies are closer to le Carre's world of shadowy, cynical bureaucrats than the flashy James Bond, but this whole picture of shadowy, cynical men playing games of betrayal is not a real picture of the world of spying either.

"Casino Royale" manages the worst of all possible worlds. It is one downbeat, cynical movie with a totally stupid, implausible, totally disjointed plot. I can believe Ian Fleming's Bond was a more serious character than Moore's Bond, or even Connery's Bond. I can't believe Fleming wrote this bad a plot. However, I have not read this particular Bond book, and I could be wrong.

Gone in Casino Royale are the fancy gadgets and fantastic stunts. No cars with machine guns and parachuting off of cliffs on skis. The opening sequence is little more than a fist fight--meant to set the grimly realistic tone. There is no single, impressive villain, or cartoon henchmen with steel hats. There is only the faceless, le Carre man in a suit behind it all. And none of it makes any sense.

The "plot" is about a "money man" for world terrorists, who is supposed to take care of their money for them. Bond foils a terrorist attack on an airliner in a series of scenes as unbelievable as anything in a Moore Bond movie. The "money man" had "shorted" airline stocks (reference to pre-9/11 activity in stock market), but ended up losing the 100 million dollars he was "protecting" for terrorists. This guy does not even really appear in the movie until this point, and the movie is already a half hour or more long. He is not even the main villain.

In a plot device that really is absurd, the "money man" decides to set up a World Series of Poker type tournament (I can't make this stuff up, and wish no one could) to win back the 100 million dollars he lost, and thereby save himself from the terrorists who will be after his skin for losing their money. Uh-huh. That makes sense--not. It does give Bond a chance to appear in the type of exotic, casino setting typical of a Bond movie, but which is almost a jarring note in this one (which has none of the other touches of a Bond movie--the quips and smart remarks are few and delivered with a dour tone).

Bond ends up winning the poker tournament, and from them on you have the most unbelievable anti-climax in the history of major movies. This leads to the worst ending in my memory (although I surely have blocked out the horror of some bad endings), excepting on Mission Impossible III.

You see, Bond and his new love are captured by the movie man, and Bond tortured to get him to reveal the password for access tot he money. WHY would the money man, desperate to get the money back, figure that Bond had not transferred the money to his government, where it could not be reached? Don't ask questions like that. It will spoil your enjoyment of this movie, as it did mine.

The terrorists, behind which lurks the "head man" (the bureaucrat in a suit), attack and kill the "money man", and everyone in the area--EXCEPT Bond and his love. This is the beginning of that terrible, dragged out, anti-climactic ending based on total nonsense. Why were Bond and his girl not killed (no credit to Bond)? Well, the le Carre villain is still after the 100 million, which eventually (and unbelievably) ends up being withdrawn by the girl, seemingly in a metal case. If you could follow this, you are better than me. The whole sequence by which the money came into control of the woman makes no sense at all. The whole ending made no sense, and was just a drawn out set up for a "tragic", downbeat, le Carre type ending.

Rating (scale of 1 to 100): 31. It is only rated that high because the movie is well made, and visually fairly impressive (albeit without the Bond gadgets or impressive stunts).


This is one bad move. Readers of this blog know that this review is fairly typical of my review of most modern action movies (see review of Mission Impossible III--where rating was, I think, around 21). The idea of these movies is that only image and MTV flash matters, and that literate scripts and plots that make some sort of sense do not matter. Sound like Obama to you? It should. Maybe that is why Obama did so well. Further, the emotion (tragic ending of "Casino Royale") is all ersatz--not earned, but simply pulled out of the air by outrageous, implausible setups.

If you have not seen this movie (now almost two years old), don't.