Recently rented the DVD Casino Royale, much-touted new Bond flick.
What an incredible disappointment!
We’d heard Daniel Craig was the best Bond ever. Utter nonsense. He came across simply as arrogant, without much depth. Sean Connery remains for me the Best Bond Ever. Touch of arrogance which translated into cool surety, class, style, vulnerability, everything you needed of your super-hero.
The screenplay felt as though it had been written by a group of adolescents working on their high school English essay: ‘So, like, we’ll have the dude blow this up, and then he’ll go to this city and then, yeah, like, have him do this, oh wow, man, and then we could have him do that.’ Absolutely no continuity, plausibility. Okay, okay, I know this is a Bond film. What does plausibility have to do with a Bond film? But the original Bond films with Connery at least had continuity. It wasn’t a series of bad vignettes strung together and called a cohesive whole.
Time-line: The film appears to take Bond back to his roots, the beginning, how it is he came to be a 007. It failed utterly. Given the huge body of work that has gone before this film, one would expect the film to have been somewhat of a period piece. It wasn’t. Just drop this new Bond into the actual present and pretend this is the first Bond ever. Doesn’t work. Not for a moment. Especially not for an auld pharte like me who remembers that very first Bond film: Goldfinger. Action: Even from the action flick point of view, we felt this film failed. Not much really in the way of anything innovative or interesting. No wonderful Bond toys. In short, don’t waste your money renting this DVD. It’s just not worth either the money, or the time you’ll waste watching it.