Casino Royale Review

Campbell had already restarted this series once and does it better here by taking away the gadgets, the quips and most of the invulnerability. The chase across a Madagascar building site sets the terms. Bond is slower, heavier and less elegant than the man he is following, and he wins by going through walls rather than over them. Daniel Craig arrived to open hostility and answered it with a performance that plays arrogance as insecurity, and by the Montenegro stretch the doubt has gone.

Eva Green is the reason the film works. Vesper is written as an equal and played as someone with her own film running offscreen, and the stairwell scene after the fight is more affecting than anything in the series before it. The poker is shot with more patience than sense, and the plot gives up on Le Chiffre with an hour still to run. The Venice ending is twenty minutes longer than it needs to be. Even so, this is the entry that made the character interesting again, and every Bond film since has been measured against it.