Okay so roughly right after we saw Cloud Atlas, Blaine and I watched all of Daniel Craig's Bond films so with that done, let's begin to wrap up this James Bond movie marathon with Casino Royale.
Plot: After getting his 00 status back, Bond kills a bomb-maker in Madagascar and takes his phone and tries to track it to find out who he's working for. Eventually, his lead leads him to a terrorist financier named Le Chiffre. So Bond is assigned to bankrupt Chiffre in a high-stakes poker game with the help of the treasury employee assigned to provide the money, Vesper Lynd.
As soon as Blaine and I got to the beginning of the title sequence to this film, I was hooked. This film isn't even meant to precede or succeed any of the other Bond films, it's basically a reboot of the whole franchise. And the result is a film that is very smartly written. The story is very different from the other Bond films and is more realistic and more thought out. In fact it's a very character and story heavy movie - there wasn't a whole lot of action compared to a lot of the other films in my opinion. When I was only planning to get to Craig's films, my brother who has seen this movie and Skyfall said that Craig is viewed to be a very, very different kind of Bond. And he's turning out so far to be absolutely right. Craig's Bond is much more darker and gritty as Bond which is similar to Timothy Dalton as Bond, but he's more reckless, brutal and cold with how he's very focused on the mission, but he's also vulnerable in a couple of ways. Also he and M and kind of starting to be a little more personal around each other which is starting to make her much more interesting. And then you have Vesper who is less of a sex object then probably any of the other Bond girls. In fact she's probably the more human then most of the characters in probably any James Bond film in general. She's very smart and focused on the mission but when it comes down to witnessing Bond fighting the bad guys she can be very vulnerable in a much more believable and realistic way rather then just follow Bond around and look pretty. In fact she's probably one of the very best Bond girls because of how she's much more of an actual person to care for just like Tracy in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Also there was at least some gadgets while not really shown majorly like Die Another Day which was really nice, and the title sequence was just awesome. Finally while the ending may have taken longer then some people felt it should've been, it was done very well and is altogether a great example at how Craig's Bond is starting to go a very different route from the Bond movies in a lot of ways.
And that's my review for Casino Royale, while dying down from gadgets and action for the most part, we seem them replaced with a whole new kind of Bond that is smarter, more edgy, very character and story heavy and is altogether very different from the Bond films making this a great Bond film and a great movie in general.
Weak villain though.
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