Like most in the blogosphere, we considered doing a Top-Ten list of somethingorother as is typical for end-of-year blog posts, but decided instead on a typically brief, typically S&F-acid movie review, typically a few years after the fact of the movie's release, for no better reason other than we just saw the movie for the first time, and it really pissed us off.
We're speaking here of the twenty-first entry in the James Bond movie franchise: 2006's Casino Royale — a movie that received almost universal critical praise as did Daniel Craig in his first outing as Bond — and find ourself in the position of the lunatic who thinks the whole world mad except himself. But as Manohla Dargis put it in her review of the movie for The New York Times, "Every generation gets the Bond it deserves if not necessarily desires," and we guess that says it all in a nutshell.
Mr. Craig's Bond is a Sylvester-Stallone-style lout with a British accent, and Casino Royale, little more than an unmitigated, straight-up action flick with a mindless, humorless plot whose primary purpose is to act as a narrative thread on which to string the largely brutal and bloody action sequences.
Not a pretty picture, not a pretty picture at all. That notwithstanding, Mr. Craig's Bond was seen by critics as a "wonderfully fresh portrait of Bond," as one critic put it, while another, expressing an opinion shared by most of his brethren, declared Casino Royale "gritty and thrilling."
Is that so. Well, we beg to differ. We thought nothing could top for dumb-ass-ness the dumb-ass, special-effects-ridden Bond flicks starring Pierce Brosnan, but this 2006 Casino Royale manages the trick nicely. And as for Craig's Bond, we can't say it better than we did about the various Bonds in this 2008 S&F post dealing with the degeneration of the Bond movies over the years:
As if we Bond movie connoisseurs, other considerations aside, could get past the ultimate absurdity of ... movie actors playing at being James Bond. We all know the genuine article is Sean Connery, and these other clowns merely inadequate, playacting imposters unworthy to deliver Bond's signature response as to who he might be: "Bond. James Bond."But Ms. Dargis is right. Every generation gets the Bond it deserves, and, sadly, this Bond, both the character and the movie, is indeed a Bond for our time. Farewell, decade of the naughts.
On The Road To Prohibition
