Cinematical

Pierce Brosnan's last memorable line as James Bond comes early in Die Another Day, during a routine walking tour with gadget guru and perpetual shut-in Q. After passing by some vintage toys from his twenty prior adventures -- they don't seem to spark much recognition -- Bond is led to a vehicle track, where an empty platform comes rolling by. "The ultimate in British engineering," Q announces, proudly. "You must be joking," comes the reply. Apparently, someone was joking. In addition to the invisible Aston Martin, the last and least of the Brosnan quartet also featured a mansion chiseled out of ice, a medical procedure for changing a person's race, and an orbiting magnifying glass used by the villain to cook enemies on the ground like ants. The whole enterprise smelled of Viagra. Enter producer Barbara Broccoli, who like a Templar Knight, has devoted her life to fulfilling a task handed down by her father -- protecting the Bond franchise from harm. Brosnan was tossed, and a series re-boot commissioned. How severely the foundations would be rocked no one knew.

What's been delivered is a movie not only exciting and sharp-eyed, but also weirdly respectful of the character Ian Fleming first dreamed up at his Goldeneye resort in Jamaica. Casino Royale, the origin tale, is unfortunately saddled with one of the series' least evocative titles. A better one might have been Ballbreaker, which would not only reference the story's signature scene -- when the villain Le Chiffre captures Bond and attacks his balls with a carpet beater -- it would also get at the creation moment, when the Bond we know is punished into existence by a velvet heartbreaker called Vesper Lynd. Luminous French actress Eva Green melts the screen as the Eve-figure in Bond mythology, who rides shotgun for 007's first globe trot, beginning in the toy soldier kingdom of Montenegro and going all the way to an oceanside Bahamas vista, and further. Green makes this Vesper's film, with her actions half-explaining, half-justifying everything that will follow her -- a thousand misogynist sneers, a catalog of cold remarks, and the hero's often-suspicious inability to save the girl.

Stepping into the suit is English thespian Daniel Craig, most known previously for his portrait of the sullen house-husband poet Ted Hughes in Sylvia. His interpretation of Bond is, intriguingly, closer in style to the rough, determined improviser Timothy Dalton than to either Brosnan or Connery, who could never quite convince us that they cared more for the mission than the muff. Craig's Bond seems to care an awful lot about winning and takes a quiet measure of satisfaction when his enemies gaze on his lumpy boxer's face and lower their expectations a notch or two. Case in point, the film's opening teaser, shot on luxurious black and white stock in some kind of superfluous nod to the novel's Cold War backdrop, which has been otherwise carved completely away. MI6 has dangled two easy kills that will earn young Bond his promotion to the elusive 00 status. One is an MI6 turncoat named Dryden, who is confronted in his office after hours by Bond and sniffs nothing threatening at all until he's toppled backwards by a bullet.

The other kill is a nameless goon, of the type that have so little human gravitas in the Bond universe that their deaths are usually grist for gruesome comic relief. In this case, however, director Martin Campbell takes it in the opposite direction. A brutal, bone-breaking fistfight in a bathroom ensues, after which Bond drags the goon over to a toilet and drowns him in it. Blood is everywhere, and as the teaser closes, it even drips down the introductory titles. (In every way, the Bond 'intro' is a dud this time, with a dismally cheap-looking credit sequence accompanied by a Chris Cornell song so inaccessible and un-catchy that it wouldn't make the cut for an Audioslave double-album) Later in the film, after being forced to dispatch more baddies during an intermission in a high-stakes poker match at the Casino Royale, Bond is once again spotted in blood and stares at himself in the mirror while holding a drink. Vesper, a witness to everything, curls into the fetal position under a running shower head.

"It doesn't bother you, killing those people?" she asks at one point. His response is a little too second generation: "I wouldn't be very good at my job if I did." The real answer is that it does seem to bother him. He will eventually make that clear by typing up a hasty resignation letter to MI6. Although Casino Royale is neatly bisected into talking scenes and action scenes, the latter of which contain lots of hard, Tom Cruise-style running and dirty street fighting, the film gets points for elbowing in plausible conversations. Vesper, instead of being sprung from the hero's filthy imagination, challenges Bond simply by being real enough to affect his decision-making. Checking into a hotel in one scene, there's a cheeky moment when Bond must create an alias for her on the spot: "Stephanie Broadchest?" Sorry, Mr. Bond. That won't do. If Casino Royale had been brave enough to put down a few of its action set-pieces, which interrupt the real story like commercial breaks, it would surely have wowed the audience with this quickening story of first love.

Also, for a film that's done some admirable thinking about violence, it must be said that the villain Le Chiffre is toothless. His racket is to take money from terrorist sponsors and then put it on cards to rake off extra profit. Because the plot requires him to be planted at a card table almost without interruption, he verges on being a non-entity. Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen can't quite transform himself into a French turd. Even when frustration causes droplets of blood to run from his disfigured eye, he seems on the verge of leaping up and giving Bond a big, friendly Copenhagen bear hug. There's a fun moment late in the film when Bond, assigned to thwart Le Chiffre in the big game and force him to return to his bosses empty-handed, catches a run of cold cards. It looks like he will lose the game. That's when he curls his fingers around a table knife. If he can't win the hand like he's supposed to, he can at least plant something in Le Chiffre's chest on his way out the door. Improvisation!