Casino royale parkour chase

Watching his bravery, I don’t think I ever wanted to be Bond more, or felt further away from him. Anybody can run up a crane because nobody can; but sat in Bond’s chair I highly doubt my ability to wisecrack. Props to Mads Mikkelsen here; his escalating desperation raises the stakes but I particularly love the deep sigh of acceptance and the weary, almost amused: “You really aren’t going to tell me, are you?” Mutually assured destruction has briefly united the two men. Gorgeous, gorgeous scene from everybody: actors, writers, director, even the guy who made the chair.

But enter Mr White and exit Le Chiffre. This must be so. Not only does it mimic the book but the Le Chiffre storyline is done, the game is over. The problem is this storyline is also the story of the film: there’s nowhere really left to go. But of course Vesper must be exposed so on we plod to Venice. Yet the dramatic tension is lost; the climax has come and gone. It’s like those cartoons where Wile E Coyote keeps running on thin air having not yet realised he’s run out of cliff.

My theory? Spiritually the last twenty minutes of Casino Royale are in fact the first twenty ofQuantum Of Solace. All the issues that bedevil the latter film suddenly rise to the surface: incoherent action, random characters introduced seemingly on a whim, and absolutely no attempt to explain what’s going on.

Why has Vesper withdrawn the money? Who is the guy with the eyepatch? Where did Mr. White come from? Some questions are answered, some are left unresolved, but the whole thing would work much better with a bit of prior explanation.

Essentially, the film bottles it. The need for action at the close trumps narrative coherency. You can’t introduce a random foe in the final act and expect the audience to care. Even if he does have a eyepatch. In fairness it’s hard to plot a satisfactory ending. In the book she just writes a letter which obviously wouldn’t work; an exposition-heavy climax, in which Bond discovers and confronts her only minus all the gunfire, would also be hard to pull off, especially after the torture scene – the exact equivalent for Bond and Le Chiffre. At the very least Eyepatch should have been introduced much earlier in the film.

Shame to end on a downer so let’s celebrate the neat final line of “Bond, James Bond” and Monty Norman at full blast. We don’t get much Monty in Craig, a decision I rather agree with; by this point the theme has become a sideshow, a character in itself. I’m not sure you could take any scene it soundtracked entirely seriously: the self-referentialism would hang too heavy.