Casino Royale (Collector's Edition + BD Live) [Blu-ray]

Casino Royale (Collector's Edition + BD Live) [Blu-ray]

Casino Royale (Collector's Edition + BD Live) [Blu-ray]

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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Jesper Christensen, John Chancer, Tom Chadbon
Brand: CRAIG,DANIEL
Composer: David Arnold
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Collector's Edition, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.40:1
Running Time: 144 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-10-21
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Sony Pictures

Movie Reviews of Casino Royale (Collector's Edition + BD Live) [Blu-ray]

Movie Review: #19 on the List of My 20 Favorite Films of the 2000s
Summary: 5 Stars

Director Martin Campbell has a slightly uneven track record. Not all of his films have received the most stellar reviews. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, he's looking about fifty-fifty on the Tomatometer scale right now. But if there's anything The Mask of Zorro and Goldeneye proved, it's that Campbell does have some measure of talent. When he's on, he's on, and when he's on, it's fun and fast and friendly, and above all else, entertaining, which is everything movies like his should be. Not all films have to be dour dramas.

Later this month, a movie helmed by Campbell known as Edge of Darkness will hit theaters. This movie features Mel Gibson doing his first work in front of the camera since 2002, so I'm eager to see what Campbell does with that potential powder keg. And I'm also looking forward to seeing what he does with Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern in 2011.

For now though, I want to talk about the exercise in pure adventure that stands as Campbell's finest work to date: namely, Casino Royale.

Reboots have been all the rage since Batman Begins came along and showed how a floundering film franchise could, in the hands of the right creative collaborators, not only recover its footing, but be taken to new cinematic heights. Yet the Batman film franchise was comparatively young when it started to flounder. It only had four installments under its belt, whereas the James Bond franchise had a whopping twenty under its belt before someone decided to go back to the drawing board and reintroduce Ian Fleming's secret-agent character to a new generation of filmgoers.

Thus we are treated to Casino Royale, which might just as easily be thought of as "Bond Begins," since it, like Batman Begins, gives us an origin story that for the first time (for me at least) turns its franchise's tried-and-true, trite-and-true action hero into a truly compelling character in and of himself. Yeah, I was never a James Bond fan, but the blonde Bond made a believer out of me. Meaner and more musclebound, Daniel Craig projects an intensity that inarguably (well, in my opinion) goes well beyond any of his immediate three predecessors.

Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan were all well and good as Agent 007, but I guess a part of me always just dismissed the Bond films as generic action movies, a series of formulaic flicks that might make for some fun Friday-night viewings, but that were of no real lasting value otherwise. Even when Campbell gave the Bond franchise a modern makeover with Goldeneye, making Bond's superior, M, a woman, and thereby the perfect character foil for Bond, there was still something missing. I enjoyed Goldeneye, but it and the three subsequent Brosnan Bond films never really resonated with me on any deep level. It was not until Daniel Craig took over the role that I was able to become seriously invested in the character, to understand why he was the way he was, and what his appeal was to people.

The blond Bond makes me want to buy expensive cologne and an Omega Seamaster wristwatch. The blond Bond makes me want to dress sharply and drive a sports car and drink shaken-not-stirred martinis in the manliest way possible. Someone once asked me if I had ever had a man-crush, one of those purely platonic "crushes" that a hetero guy will develop for another guy whom he really looks up to? Well I have a man-crush on the blond Bond. I can see now why so many guys would idolize this guy, James Bond. Man, oh, man, does he come off as a real chest-thumping man's man in this movie! The kind of bad-ass who can withstand torture. The kind of brutally handsome Brit that you'd want to make damn sure your wife never met, lest she wind up shagging him on the floor of his rented villa in the Bahamas.

There's just something in Daniel Craig's eyes, something that lets you know he's got that fire in his belly. A three-minute black-and-white sequence makes up the instant-classic prologue before the main title sequence of Casino Royale, and in the span of those three minutes, through sheer physicality, a few fearsome facial expressions, a few lines of mordantly witty dialogue, and some inspired kick-assery (the bathroom fight), Craig is able to establish himself as a Bond unlike any we have ever seen before: a Bond who is, in the words of M, "a blunt instrument," a Bond who carries out assassination orders with brutal efficiency.

I love how they show Bond making the two kills necessary to earn him his double-0 status. I love the exchange between Bond and the treasonous MI6 section chief who is about to become his second kill.

"How did he die?" the section chief asks, referring to Bond's first kill.
"Your contact?" Bond says. "Not well."

Cut to Bond slamming the first guy's head into a sink. As a British person would say, "Brilliant!"

As far as I'm concerned, the only Bond who might give Daniel Craig a run for his money as "best Bond ever" is the original James Bond, Sean Connery. And if you want me to be honest, I really only say that out of deference to the fact that it was Connery who originated the role.

Granted, Connery is a Scotsman, and Scotsmen are tough, and Connery was apparently so macho and manly from growing up in Edinburgh and getting into street fights that he once faced down the famous mob enforcer, Johnny Stampanato, in a real-life confrontation that began with Stampanato brandishing a gun and ended with Connery disarming Stampanato and running him off the set of a pre-James-Bond Connery movie.

However, Connery also allegedly beat his wife. And that ain't it cool, man. That ain't cool. Even if there's no truth to the allegation, or you want to make the argument that a man's personal life should have no bearing on the assessment of his art, the idea that he beat his wife still seems like it might almost serve as an oblique commentary on what a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" the old James-Bond, as an emblem of ideals, really was.

The fact of the matter is, Sean Connery's 007 was a hero for a different time. He was a hero more at home in my grandparents' VHS collection than he would be now on any DVD or Blu-Ray shelf of mine. That statement may come across as heretical to some, but all I can say is, when I go back and watch scenes from them now, all those old Bond movies just feel sorely out-of-date. The look and feel of movies have changed since the '60s and '70s. Our culture has changed, obviously, and I feel like all the budding Bond fans of my generation needed something that would measure up to today's standards, something that would be able to keep pace with the Bourne films, something that would just generally be more in keeping with the current film aesthetic.

With Casino Royale, we get that. We get a fresh start, free of forty years of continuity. As if to symbolize the passing of the torch from the '60s Beatles generation to the people who grew up during the '90s alternative-rock boom like me, we, or at least this one reviewer, also get a new favorite Bond theme, as Sir Paul McCartney and Wings step down from the throne, and a Chris Cornell song called "You Know My Name" displaces "Live and Let Die" in the seat of power.

Casino Royale is the best Bond movie of any era. Only with Casino Royale do we see that the notorious womanizer, James Bond, was once a man very much in love who considered walking away from the life of a spy, for love, only to have his trust betrayed and his heart broken. Now we can see how Bond's whole love-'em-and-leave-'em M.O. was shaped, how his masculine posturing at the end of the film ("The job's done. The bitch is dead") might on some level just be a disingenuous coping mechanism. There have been plenty of Bond girls, plenty of Barbie dolls, maybe even a few who were every bit Bond's equal; and of course the maternal M, played by Judi Dench, has provided a strong female presence in the Bond character's on-screen "life" since Goldeneye. But in a sense, Vesper Lynd, plyaed by Eva Green, is the only woman in his life who truly matters, because Vesper Lynd is the one he lets in, the one who actually manages to hurt him before he forever walls himself off emotionally. "I have no armor left," he tells her. "You've stripped it from me." And you've stripped it from me, blond Bond. My armor as a critic, that is.

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Summary of Casino Royale (Collector's Edition + BD Live) [Blu-ray]

Casino Royale introduces JAMES BOND before he holds his license to kill. But Bond is no less dangerous, and with two professional assassinations in quick succession, he is elevated to "00" status. "M" (Judi Dench), head of the British Secret Service, sends the newly-promoted 007 on his first mission that takes him to Madagascar, the Bahamas and eventually leads him to Montenegro to face Le Chiffre, a ruthless financier under threat from his terrorist clientele, who is attempting to restore his funds in a high-stakes poker game at the Casino Royale. "M" places Bond under the watchful eye of the Treasury official Vesper Lynd. At first skeptical of what value Vesper can provide, Bond's interest in her deepens as they brave danger together. Le Chiffre's cunning and cruelty come to bear on them both in a way Bond could never imagine, and he learns his most important lesson: Trust no one.

The most successful invigoration of a cinematic franchise since Batman Begins, Casino Royale offers a new Bond identity. Based on the Ian Fleming novel that introduced Agent 007 into a Cold War world, Casino Royale is the most brutal and viscerally exciting James Bond film since Sean Connery left Her Majesty's Secret Service. Meet the new Bond; not the same as the old Bond. Daniel Craig gives a galvanizing performance as the freshly minted double-0 agent. Suave, yes, but also a "blunt instrument," reckless, and possessed with an ego that compromises his judgment during his first mission to root out the mastermind behind an operation that funds international terrorists. In classic Bond film tradition, his global itinerary takes him to far-flung locales, including Uganda, Madagascar, the Bahamas (that's more like it), and Montenegro, where he is pitted against his nemesis in a poker game, with hundreds of millions in the pot. The stakes get even higher when Bond lets down his "armor" and falls in love with Vesper (Eva Green), the ravishing banker's representative fronting him the money.

For longtime fans of the franchise, Casino Royale offers some retro kicks. Bond wins his iconic Astin-Martin at the gaming table, and when a bartender asks if he wants his martini "shaken or stirred," he disdainfully replies, "Do I look like I give a damn?" There's no Moneypenny or "Q," but Dame Judi Dench is back as the exasperated M, who one senses, admires Bond's "bloody cheek." A Bond film is only as good as its villain, and Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre, who weeps blood, is a sinister dandy. From its punishing violence and virtuoso action sequences to its romance, Casino Royale is a Bond film that, in the words of one character, makes you feel it, particularly during an excruciating torture sequence. Double-0s, Bond observes early on, "have a short life expectancy." But with Craig, there is new life in the old franchise yet, as well as genuine anticipation for the next one when, at last, the signature James Bond theme kicks in following the best last line ever in any Bond film. To quote Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin, now I know what I've been faking all these years. --Donald Liebenson

Stills from Casino Royale (click for larger image)

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