BIG MOVIE FREAK - Casino Royale

Valenka
(Ivana Milicevic)
Inconsequential Bond Girl #1

The Bond Identity
For those late in the game, Casino Royale is the official twenty-first movie of the popular James Bond spy action-thriller franchise, which first started with Dr. No in 1962. All of the Bond movies have stand-alone stories that can be watched separately and out-of-sequence without referring to past installments. Throughout the years, gadget technology, political crises and actors change, but the Bond formula remains the same. The series have undergone minor tweaking a few times before to bring it up to times; the last was Goldeneye with a more athletic Bond and a woman as Bond’s boss “M”. With Casino Royale, the filmmakers reset the hero’s entire history (some may think of it as a prequel) and start his story with his first assignment, under his newly appointed “007 licenced to kill” status.

You know the promises they made about revamping the franchise? The changes in this Bond movie are as obvious as Daniel Craig's blond fuzz and 5'11" frame, but thankfully, the better for it. It was as if the Bond producers listened and took heed of the comments by people who felt that Jason Bourne (main character from The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy) was what James Bond should have been, despite that the original formula's still raking in the dough in the last Bond movie (Die Another Day). Past Bond reincarnations were rather fantastical; they're still cold-blooded assassins, but they would always come out of a fight smirking, with nary a hair out of place or a tuxedo ruffled and smudged. These usually sustain rather than suspend a sense of disbelief. But Daniel Craig's Bond is exactly what you would expect a licenced-to-kill clandestine operative to be like: blunt, brutal and bleeding; in other words, badass. I half expected him to speak in brogue Irish or Cockney accent. In many ways, it ripped off Batman Begins' lauded concept of "keeping it real" to the point that the two movies began to feel like they belong in the same universe; that Bond could plausibly bump into the Dark Knight while doing his own brand of rooftop hopping.

It's a welcomed approach after twenty reiterations of more or less the same thing, but I do miss the wry, aristocratic Bond of yesteryears. - BMF

Synopsis: After thwarting several terrorist attempts, British Intelligence MI6 agent James Bond (Daniel Craig) traces the source to Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), financier to various international terrorist factions. Suffering heavy financial loss from the botched attempts, Le Chiffre plans to recoup his clients’ money through a high-stakes game of poker at the Casino Royale in Montenegro. It’s up to Bond to foil his plan, get the girl(s), and save the world for his very first time.

P U S S Y G A L O R E

"I also like to live my life dangerously!"