BY ALEX HO

In print | November 30, 2006

I was about to begin this review by saying “James Bond is one of those cultural absurdities.” But no, I correct myself: James Bond is the cultural absurdity. How is it that for nearly half a century we’ve kept alive the character that invented the secret agent genre, has long since become a rote cliché and has even taken cues from its innumerable imitators and parodies? Whether endearing as escapist fantasy or as a showcase of pop culture touchstones (a Madonna cameo, for goodness sake!), it is completely likely that James Bond could continue existing on camp mode from movie to movie for all of eternity. But director Martin Campbell, who helmed “Goldeneye,” and veteran writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade had other plans for our favorite double-O, returning to Ian Fleming’s first novel, “Casino Royale.”

It seems to be the tired vogue for franchises these days. (What do we do when we’ve well worn out our story yarn and regressed into cheesiness? That’s right, it’s time for an origin story!) But, for the most part, “Casino Royale” is a success, fusing the romantic appeal of Bond with an understated discipline and, for a change, an interest in Bond as a person. The centerpiece of the film is nothing as operatic and far-fetched as a megalomaniac’s volcanic lair, but instead a quietly tense game of Texas Hold’em, in which Bond must beat a greasy mathematical genius and terrorist financer named Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen). It is exhilarating to watch a character that has for so long been a cardboard cipher trade up the physical for the psychological.

To be sure, “Casino Royale” has its fair share of spectacle — a crazy chase sequence in Uganda with completely unnecessarily explosions, another fight sequence that literally brings down the house, beautiful sights from the Bahamas to Montenegro to Venice. But Bond also seems to inhabit a world much more closely resembling reality. Bond makes mistakes in this one, and Campbell goes out of his way to show his every bone-cracking stumble. We don’t have the usual repertoire of gadget training and villain monologue-ing, and quite a few characters don’t get any exposition or dialogue, which, though less dramatic, is probably more accurate of the real world of espionage. Bond has also largely abandoned his pun-toting ways. One of the few times he manages a corny line at a dinner with his romantic interest, she quickly retorts with “oh, that was a good one.”

Okay, there is the iconic scene on a tropical beach with flecks of sun in the clear water, out of which we watch a beautiful glistening body unassumingly emerge. But this time it’s not Ursula Andress or Halle Berry but Mr. Bond himself, as played by the perfectly chiseled Daniel Craig, whose skimpy baby blue swimsuit is as erotically implicative as anything that any Bond girl has barely worn. Perhaps it would be a stretch to call “Casino Royale” a revolt against cinema’s conventional notions of sexual objectification. There’s no more of the faux-feminism that colored the Brosnan films; Daniel Craig’s Bond is all misogynist. But the movie makes a point not to shy away from this, making full nuanced light of his unhealthy relationship with the women in the film.

The Bond girls, this time around, are refreshingly without a degrading name like Pussy Galore or the butt-kicking qualifications that were requisites for the Brosnan girls of the ‘90s to pass as empowered. The first, a curvy Solange (Caterina Murino), is just a one-time fling, but she isn’t pigeonholed as good or bad. The second is Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), who has the markings of a real human being and (shock) isn’t learned in the ways of espionage and assassination. She is involved with Bond only as a professional obligation. Fireworks do eventually fly, but only when Bond has made a serious emotional investment.

“Casino Royale” is less of a fantasy and more of a character study. It sees Bond not as a vehicle for vicarious sadistic entertainment but as a reckless killing machine. More so than in any Bond movie in my memory, we’re forced to sit through the gruesomeness and inhumanity that has always been inherent in Bond’s license to kill. Deaths no longer have the witty, almost cartoon-ish stylishness; they’re drawn-out, laborious and downright sick.

At one point in the film, Bond’s superior M (the always-reliable Judi Dench), enraged by Bond’s cocky behavior, snaps, “Christ, I miss the Cold War.” For M, Bond may have become more of a pain, but for us, he has become delightfully more complicated and interesting to watch. Without a Cold War as a moral background and with the uncertainty and disillusionment that has shaken the insular, mass-entertained developed world since 9/11, “Casino Royale” is Bond at its most unsure, most brooding and most nihilistic.

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