Executive summary: go see it.
spoilers
I read this film described as James Bond: Year One, which should help set expectations for anyone familiar with the notion of the retelling of an origin story. So Craig is playing a version of Bond who hasn't yet lived the life of a 00. At that level, the performance sort of works - you can almost see this character becoming the Bond played by Connery. Maybe.
The performance owes a lot to Robert Shaw, I think.
He doesn't have all the trappings of sophistication; would those really come after he had spent time running around being assigned to kill people? I'm not sure that I buy that notion.
There's also a bit much "James Bond, World's Greatest Detective" going on.
Eva Green, enh. Like most Bond girls, were she in my bed I would bring her crackers, but I'm not sure that she really brought more to the table than Carey Lowell did, or perhaps a combination of Rosamund Pike and Lowell.
Mikkelsen was excellent, though the part really didn't give him as much to work with as he deserved (assuming, of course, that they didn't deliberately leave a lot of his work on the cutting room floor).
Wow - Hollywood figures out that you can have a straight flush in poker that doesn't include the ace! I'm so impressed. That said, it didn't appear to me to be particularly good no limit holdem. Also, Bond loses track of the real objective of the game; that may have been a deliberate choice by the screen writer, but if so they should have drawn more attention to it.
From the end of the poker game on, the movie was a bit weak. Good car chase, as it were, and the final scene between Bond and Le Chiffre was well played. But the pacing was very off, and the explanations for the resolution really didn't hold together (drawing from another problem space altogether "if you have to explain it, it is already wrong").
Where does it rank? #2 behind Golden Eye as non-Connery films go, though I think it was a lot closer to cracking the top three than Brosnan managed.
November 20, 2006 5:23 PM
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