Royale Treatment

As I mentioned earlier, I did get the chance to see the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale, while I was on my work trip to GenCon SoCal. I've now had nearly a week to think about my response to the film, and I have to say that my opinion of it has diminished a bit the more I think about it.

As I felt at the time, I have to say the film was "good, but not great." They did a number of things that I really liked. This movie is more physical, realistic, and visceral than any Bond movie has been for a long time... maybe ever. It honestly feels more like the two Bourne movies (Identity and Supremacy) than a James Bond movie. You could decide to see that as a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm going to call it a good thing. It made it possible to enjoy the movie emotionally, and not just on a whiz-bang level.

There are a number of sequences in the movie that are excellent. The first fifteen minutes or so are superb. The prologue is very artfully done, letting you know clearly that this isn't going to be the run-of-the-mill approach to Bond. The opening credits sequence (always a point to mention when discussing a Bond movie) is one of the best the franchise has ever had. And the following action sequence involving "free running" is really neat -- it wonderfully straddles a line of being over-the-top-James-Bond fantasy without actually seeming implausible, because you know that much of it is not camera or special effects tricks.

The acting is great. Daniel Craig makes a solid James Bond, and I'll look forward to more movies with him. I think Pierce Brosnan got a bit of a bum deal, since of the four Bond movies he made, only the first one (GoldenEye) was any good -- and because of the scripts, not for any fault of his own. In any case, Craig (and the other actors in the cast) elevate the material.

And therein is my big problem. It is material in need of elevating. After a rock solid opening salvo, the film starts to lose steam. By about an hour into it, I found myself impatiently checking my watch. The middle crawls. The poker scenes are fairly bad -- but I admit to coming at as someone way too into poker. In dumbing down the set-up of the hands enough for them to play to a broad audience, they became laughable to anyone who knows anything about poker. I found it no challenge to read the hole cards of every player in every significant hand, and it made the actual characters silly and stupid that they could not. No tension, either.

The movie picked up again in the last twenty minutes or so, but noticeably, many people had already left the theater. There came a point after about two hours where literally a dozen or two dozen people got up and left the theater. Did they really think the movie was over at that point? Were they just bored regardless? I suppose I'll never know, but it's pretty telling that you've got that many people walking out of a James Bond movie.

So, great cast, great stylistic take. Outstanding opening, decent ending. But it was like an Oreo where the cream in the middle had somehow gone bad. (I don't know if that can even actually happen to an Oreo. Probably not.)

I'm left with a good feeling for future Bond films in the franchise, even though I'm not left with an altogether favorable opinion of this one. I give it a B-.