Casino Royale (2006)
By 2006, the Bond franchise had well and truly lost the plot. The Brosnan years had drifted into self-parody, and Die Another Day, with its invisible car and that excruciating CGI surfing sequence, was the nadir of a series that had stopped taking itself seriously some time before that. Something had to give. A reset was not just overdue, it was urgent.
Martin Campbell was the man they called, which is a fascinating bit of casting in itself. He had already relaunched 007 once before with GoldenEye in 1995, and here he was being handed the keys again, this time to do something more radical: go back to Ian Fleming's first novel, strip the mythology down to the chassis and start over, with a harder, blonder, altogether more dangerous Bond in Daniel Craig.
The tabloids had a field day with the casting, as the tabloids tend to do. Too blonde, too rough, not the right sort of face. Craig silences all of it within the opening stretch, and not just silences it but makes you wonder why anyone was fussing in the first place. This is a Bond who bruises and bleeds, who fights like a man with something to prove rather than a man going through elegant motions, and he is recognisably human in a way the character had not been in a very long time. I will happily nail my colours to the mast: he is my favourite Bond of the lot, and Casino Royale is the best film of his run. Nothing in what followed matched it, and I say that as someone who found plenty to admire in Skyfall (2012) before it faltered in its final act.
What makes it work, beyond Craig's physicality, is the set-pieces having actual weight behind them. The free-running chase sequence early on is the best of the lot: kinetic, inventive, full of scale and swagger, but grounded in a way that makes every blow feel costly. You wince. That is not something earlier Bond films often managed, and it matters enormously for what the film is trying to do.
The supporting cast pulls its weight too. Mads Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre is a wonderfully cold piece of work, a villain who does not chew scenery but instead unsettles you quietly, the blood weeping from his eye across the poker table one of those images that just stays with you. Eva Green is excellent as Vesper, doing something genuinely interesting with a role that in lesser hands could have been pure function. And Judi Dench's M, as ever, holds the whole thing together with the kind of authority you cannot fake.
It is not trying to reinvent cinema. It is a big studio spy blockbuster, and it knows it, and there is nothing wrong with that. What it is doing is reminding you why this series mattered in the first place, why people cared about James Bond beyond the gadgets and the quips and the franchise machinery. It earns its emotional beats because it has done the work of making you believe in these people, which is more than most films of this kind bother to attempt. The contrast with Spectre (2015), which threw most of this goodwill away in pursuit of laboured mythology, is pretty stark.
Comfortably the high point of the Craig era, and one of the best Bond films full stop. Three and a half stars.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2006 | Watched: 2026-09-06
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