Movie Review: Casino Royale

Rating:  A-

Quick summary:  “Quite Fun”

I’m a Bond fan.  Grew up reading all the books and watching the movies with Dad.  Always looked forward to the films… and then came the crap years with Timothy Dalton and the over-the-top plots and villains.  That’s really when the Bond movies stopped being fun. 

Sure, we’d still go to see them — and Pierce Brosnan was great after he finally got the role, but that really didn’t fix the primary problem of the films being utterly boring and predictable.

So with Casino Royale, the producers decided to throw out practically everything we know about how a Bond film is supposed to be and start fresh.  New Bond in Daniel Craig, minimal gadgets, and a focus back on the action and not the giant ridiculous set pieces that had become a trademark of those other Bond films.

And it works.  Daniel Craig does a fine job; there are just enough realistic gadgets to keep you in the Bond world; the bad guys are believably bad (and not trying to take over the world with a giant laser).     How well does it work?  The movie runs a little over 2-1/4 hours, and when it was over, I was disappointed that there wasn’t another 2 hours of story to tell.  If this is the future of how Bond movies are going to be for the next few years, I’m really looking forward to what they’ll do with the next one.