START WITH MAJOR ACTION !
When I attended a screenwriting class in 1983, that was one of the golden rules.
Casino Royale does that with an electrifying 20 minutes of stunts and Dolby violence. After that explosive start the film falls into a nice narrative groove which carries you swiftly through another two hours
Watching it in Boulder, Colorado, I realised I’d not seen a Bond film in the cinema since the Sixties. I’m not part of the demographic.I’m not the audience these films aim at, and I would never watch one all the way through on TV either.
If you haven’t seen Casino Royale yet, I’d recommend it as a very slick action film with shameless product placements.When Bond is in Montenegro, every car is a General Motors vehicle.
Of course, it’s beautifully put together in terms of script, camerawork and editing. But you expect that.
I liked Casino Royale because the balance of elements seemed right. Ian Fleming’s Bond was sex, snobbery and sadism with a bit of deadpan humour. This film is mostly action, romance, snobbery and sadism with deadpan humour. Frankly, we see so much sex that romance has become more interesting.
Bond makes some droll remarks to his female lead and Daniel Craig, a very fine actor, handles these humourous exchanges well.
Ian Fleming liked a quip and would have enjoyed this movie. He would have found the climactic card game against Le Chiffre to be great fun rather than utterly preposterous.
Like us, Fleming would have suspended disbelief because he wrote fantasies. A former Reuters journalist and stockbroker, he had been in naval intelligence in WW2 and knew that his brand-conscious hero, licensed to kill and packing a Beretta, was far from the real thing .John Le Carre’s spies are much more true to life.
Ian Fleming published Casino Royale, the first of his 12 Bond books, in 1953 and died in 1964 at the age of 56.