Daniel craig casino royale
The best scene in the history of Daniel Craig’s soon-to-be retired James Bond era has no action, no guns, no martinis shaken nor stirred. It takes place on a train, in a dining car, at a table where Bond is preparing to meet the accountant in charge of wiring him millions of dollars for a high-stakes poker game in Montenegro. In walks Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), who sits down and declares, “I’m the money.” Bond then engages her in haughty flirtation, in which they spar about the ridiculousness of his poker plan and guess precisely why each thinks the other is an orphan. Typical foreplay.
It’s a forceful little scene, witty and smoky, charged with Green and Craig’s natural chemistry. And it’s one of many reasons Casino Royale, directed by Martin Campbell (of GoldenEye) works so brilliantly. Darkly romantic, gritty, and packed with talented supporting players, the 2006 film was a hard refresh for the franchise, introducing Craig in supreme style. In retrospect, now that No Time to Die—his final chapter as Bond—is out the door, one can say with certainty that Casino Royale is the best Bond film of Craig’s era.
The film opens with Bond as a new 007, finally earning his license to kill and taking on a grand assignment: playing in a high-stakes poker game against Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), a terrorist desperate for cash, whose wickedness is dramatized by a bad case of haemolacria, a condition that makes his eyes tear up with blood. Vesper tags along on the journey, holding the purse strings in case Bond needs more money to stick it out in the game—or in case she needs to pull the plug on the whole operation. It’s Vesper and Bond’s budding will-they-won’t-they that tethers the film, their rat-a-tat dialogue and trauma-bonding more thrilling than any action sequence.
But that said, Casino Royale is full of explosive, memorable action sequences, opening with a black-and-white bathroom brawl between Bond and a henchman whom Bond suffocates in a sink. Then there’s the wildly impressive parkour chase scene starring Sébastien Foucan, a roughly seven-minute sequence in which Bond chases Foucan’s character around a construction site in Madagascar. Foucan is elegant and nimble, climbing up unbelievable heights and jumping off massive cranes. (Craig has said the crane scene changed his life for the better: “When I started Casino Royale I was afraid of heights. And after it, I wasn’t.”) The scene also shows off the new 007’s get-the-kill-at-all-costs mentality; when Foucan does the impossible and hurtles himself through a skinny slot in the wall, Bond follows by simply busting through the entire wall. Craig’s Bond was sleek enough to slip into elite circles, but was rough around the edges; a little wounded, a little vulnerable, but always ready for a brawl.
But even with all that Craig brought to it, Casino Royale was an excellent case of everyone around Bond being just as interesting, if not more interesting, than he is. Mikkelsen alone is an example of this, a brooding villain with a permanently curled frown, whose idea of torture leans toward BDSM. Once his henchmen get hold of Bond, Le Chiffre gets his (kinky!) revenge by stripping Bond naked and repeatedly hitting his balls, definitely a first in the franchise. In real life, both Mikkelsen and Craig wanted the Bond-age scene to be even more “brutal and insane,” before Campbell gently stopped them in their tracks, reminding them of the limits of Bondworld cinema.
Within those limits, though, Campbell found a way to fill the tall order of introducing a new Bond to the world, a difficult task in the increasingly precarious moviegoing industry. Each cycle, a new star must be carefully chosen and vetted, put through the wringer to ensure he (and it seems it will always be a he) can carry the decades-old franchise into the future. Considering Craig has led subsequent installments to billion-dollar box office hauls, it’s clear now he was the right man for the job. But his run would have worked if the first film didn’t work, delivering on the promise of a novel era worth watching. Vesper may have been the money in Casino Royale, but, in reality, it was Craig all along.
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