Casino Royale!
polycounter lvl 17
HUGE departure from the rest of the series. I like it, A LOT, to the point of agreeing with all those critics who are saying it's the best Bond film yet.
What say you guys?
What say you guys?
Replies
Bond has been reborn.
The closest thing I could remember of a bleeding Bond was when Xenia bit his lip in the sauna. In Casino Royale, he's getting bloodied up A LOT. He either is bloodied up, or has visible scars from when he was recently bloodied up.
The only thing that really bothered me was the heavy handed product placement in the movie. Having the different brand cars is ok with me, as it is an action flick, and usually they have to get somewhere fast. It's just that everyone has SonyEricsson cell phones and Sony Vaio PC's, I was surprised that 007 wasn't playing Ridge Racer 7 on the PS3 in M's apartment.
Absolutely agreed with Daz and Sonic, invisible cars and poorly-done over-the-top special effects were killing the last couple of movies, which was a shame since I thought Brosnan was a great Bond.
Product placement is ok by me as long as it's not as blatant as Blade 3 or I, Robot. These days it's getting hard to avoid in big movies anyway, so I just tend to suffer in silence
Action scenes were fantastic, loveplay dialogue was really awful though, even by the usual 'oh james...' standard but I still came out of watching it thinking I'd give it a 9 which I would downgrade now to an 8.
Considereing bond the last few years has been what I would call a 5 or a 6, its a huge improvement and felt like Bond was back on track to me.
Its a FAR cry from the best bond ever though, I wonder at those that are saying that, have they seen the early bonds or just the brosnan ones?
Still, a big thumbs up from me
r.
otherwise...
The parkour section at the start was an excellent way to kick it into gear, and Daniel Craig was an awesome Bond. If only he looked a little more Bond-ish (IMHO Brosnan was the perfect look for Bond), but Craig acted the part very nicely.
My main criticisms would be that the movie was a tad over-long, and the product placement was a tad silly ("No, it's an Omega").
Apart from that, I loved it. A good amount of funny scenes, a ton of action, and a fairly interesting story... 8/10 from me!
But I have a whole sackload of stuff that I really hated about it also. Product placement? COME ON. This is the worst I have EVER seen in a movie. Way worse than I, Robot. Sony Eriksson phones. Sony Blu-Ray players. Sony Vaios. My god the list went on and on.
Scondly - WTF is with the poker? Poker is not a James Bond game. Baccarrat is. That's one thing that I always loved about Bond films is that the game is always baccarrat, a game that is so sophisticated and nobody understands. Poker is just flavor of the month dumbing down for America.
Opening credit sequence? God that was a terrible song.
I could keep going and spoil some of the plot and MAJOR plot holes that came with it. But I won't.
And this is just exibit R on my list of why prequels don't work. Although to be honest - this one wasn't nearly as bad as most others because this one pretty much worked, and like I said above - I did like it.
Actually good point on the opening credits sequence and music, IMHO they're one of the worst ones so far... I wasn't a fan of the animation, it was hugely unvaried in theme, the style was overly simplistic, and the song was kinda annoying. The last few intro credits sequences have been way better than that, particularly I like The World Is Not Enough, with the oil and dancing girls... ah well, can't have everything
First, somebody who is a good poker player has a supposed tell where he scratches his fricking face in plain sight? I've never played with even first time poker players who were that obvious. Bond just looked like an idiot with that one. I thought crying blood was going to be his tell, at least that would appear involuntary.
Next, Bond wins the game with the luckiest possible deal ever - no skill required. His opponents get really good hands and he's dealt a goddamn straight flush. You can't get more lucky than that. He plays like shit the entire game and gets lucky at the end. Whoop-de-doo. I would have liked it better if he had cheated using some fancy spy equipment.
Sorry for geeking out, I just had to get that off my chest. It was a very good flick over all, and a massive improvement over the last couple of Bond movies.
poker scene was too long and it couldve had just a bit more sarcasm and irony (or maybe i just didnt get the english humor?). overall the movie was quite enjoyable though.
I blame the popularity of televised poker for the painfully long poker scene. Hopefully on the "directors cut" DVD they will "cut" the poker scene down. Why does televised poker captivate so many people? Maybe I'm wrong but isn't the poker watching crowd just a bunch of toothless wonders who flip between the fishing, hunting and shopping chanels? Do they really make up a large enough portion of Bond fans that they need to take up so much screen time with something so lame?
Watching poker is something you do when you run out of cash and your buddies haven't. It's hardly a fun time... It's not something I want to go to the movies to do either.
Since the poker scene was the only scene that had me check to see if my ass had fallen asleep yet I say it was a good flick. Not many movies get me out to the theaters and I'm glad I caught this one on the big screen.
as bond films go, it couldn't have come soon enough. That ... *travesty of a last film pretty much destroyed my faith that they could make another bond film as anything less than farcical. Fair play to the producers for having ther guts to turn the franchise on its head Batman Begins style, the Year 0 stuff is really interesting.
Craig was great, but then again, they could have had Blaster from Mad Max 3 in the lead role and he would have been better than fuckin' Remington Steele
Beautiful Locations (except Miami International), superb cinematography, Bwautifil women...though the card scene went long. I play poker on occasion and it was only mildly interesting.
Fun Fact: back in 1994 I worked as a storyboard artist on a film called "Follow the Bitch" which was a movie about guys playing pokwer, and it's really really hard to keep a static scene like that interesting, and we tried so hard... The film did not do well, but the dialogue was sure snappy. :-)
Scott
It had issues, as y'all noted; the product placement was pretty iffy, the opening theme was utterly dreadful - should have got Tom Jones to sing it, give it a good ol' Modern Retro sound as he's wont to do these days, and then at least I could have understood the lyrics, which I couldn't as it sounded like a drunken tramp singing from the bottom of the well he's fallen into - the switch from Baccarrat to poker wasn't as jarring as I was expecting, but it was basically a pointless switch (I suspect the script writers play poker, and don't understand Baccarrat) and the love scenes were pretty cringeworthy due to the dodgy dialogue and stiff delivery (fnar fnar). Oh, and they trashed the Aston. They TRASHED the Aston. And it hadn't actually done anything when they did.
But other than those small concerns this film had almost everything I love about Bond and Bond movies, and ditced most of the stuff I hate. I don't mind a bit of gadgeting here and there, but invisible cars are taking it way to far into the realm of stupidity (and yes, I can deal with a car cum submarine, but not an invisocar - go figure).
Bond is a badass, but he's not a perfect killer yet - he makes mistakes that previous Bonds wouldn't have made, and is caught out by tricks that other Bonds would have seen right through and turned back on the villan - and he's still basically a 10 on the scale of movie indestructability but it's good to see him beat up and cut up and actually taking some damage from the insane amount of physical crap he goes through in the average Bond flick - the last time that happened really was Licence to Kill.
Enough burbling, I liked it, nuff said.
Oh, and Scott, they rolled the Aston for real - got a world record for doing so too
The 180 on the stance of stuck up brits making smug jokes about the yanks, then hearing the back and forth it created had really back peddaled over the years and then ended up at the point where the yanks were making the brits out to be idiots and the brits had nothing to say back!!!
For me, that was as bad as reducing the image of Bond as a sexist thug and replacing him with a PC subserviant husband type that gets up to tricks when the wife aint looking.
Sure the gadget overplay in previous films was annoying, but thats background noise and I could have ignored that if the heart was still there and it really wasnt.
I think thats what I liked best about the new bond, it has heart again, and as long as its got that, you can build on top of it.
r.
i liked Brosnan as Bond, too, but the last 3-4 Bond movies all revealed themselves as copies of copies of copies, overblown cliches masquerading as traditions. clever spyware (Connery's gas suitcase) bastardizes out to an invisocar. that's what happens when you start thinking about gimmicks and stop thinking about writing good characters.
i think it was important for the filmmakers to challenge so many of the older notions of what a 007 movie was about, including what Bond himself looks and acts like... which is why Craig as Bond was a crucial decision. think about what a disastrous disconnect there might have been with the retention of Brosnan (or someone else who "looks like Bond"), when the movie all around him had changed; it would be disconcerting. better by far to have a new Bond, and a Bond with a different look than before, to go along with the re-initialization of a justly venerable franchise.
the movie is not without its problems, and i'm in agreement with most people in this thread as to what they are. principle for me would be the slight running time bloat (poker segment is likely to blame there) and some seemingly careless integration/re-introduction of classic Bondisms. perhaps i missed something, but is there any real justification for why Bond suddenly blurts out a very specific mixture of his to-be signature drink? i guess the idea just came to him in an epiphany.
other than that, most of the other signature elements (predelictions for Aston Martin cars, the tux, etc.) were very smoothly introduced. and above all, i was very much a fan of the central love story--what exactly are you people's objections with the love dialogue? that there is any, the emotive quality/lack of, the seemingly earnestness of it?
i really enjoyed Bond's "armor" speech, and i think it's central to what the whole movie is about. yes, Bond is becomes Bond with the double-0 status, but not completely--we see his decisive relationship here, which gives ample explanation for the way Bond will likely behave around women in subsequent films (ie, in classic Bond fashion). Craig's performance, clearly hewing toward his strengths as the brooding, mostly silent tough, i thought was still very effective during the tender moments... there's a vulnerability there. which will thereafter be extinguished. because the love story is about Bond finally deciding to love someone, to trust someone--him being stripped of all his armor--and it's a mistake. one he can't afford again and will be wise enough never to repeat.
M, almost in a maternal moment, patiently waits while Bond learn the critical lesson about trust, how the love other people build their lives around can't exist in the life he's chosen.
instead of the superstar untouchable, unkillable and unflappably suave Bond of before, we have a brash Bond prone to mistakes and striking out of passion. yes, he's stil a playboy/bad boy in the organization, but one treated more like an animal, unceremoniously injected with the tracking chip. and that's much of what Casino Royale is about--we see Bond the legend born from the trials wherein he's mostly just another dog on a leash.
(i could have done without the Chinese subtitles, but movie tickets in Singapore are actually quite reasonable and the theater was nice. so i can't complain!