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In reality, however, this is a story about M and Bond, with both them coming to terms with their pasts. Bond’s ancestral home, where the fiery climax takes place, is appropriately cold and desolate, and it’s easy to see it as a metaphor for his own haunted, barren personality. As for Judi Dench’s M, while she was carried over from the Brosnan years in a bizarre stab at continuity (which doesn’t make much sense seeing how Craig’s Bond is an “earlier” iteration than Brosnan’s), she is given the full spotlight here and the relationship with Craig’s 007 is much more personal than anything that has come before. Her death in his arms is about as moving as anything in a Bond film gets.
Since M is essentially the female lead this time out, Berenice Marlohe’s Severine fails to make much of an impact during her brief screen time, although happily the new Q (Ben Whishaw) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) are both delights. And with Ralph Fiennes’ Gareth Mallory becoming the new M at the end of the movie, all the pieces of a “traditional” Bond mythology are slotted into place.
1. Casino Royale (2006)
As if there was any other choice. Casino Royale is not just Craig’s best outing as Bond, but one of the finest entries in the entire 25-film canon, easily ranking within the top five. Directed by Martin Campbell, who also helmed Brosnan’s excellent debut in GoldenEye, it instantly establishes Craig as a tough, brutish, no-nonsense 007, a man who still has to learn not just how to control his most aggressive impulses but also how to wear a tux. Even with the weird continuity we’ve mentioned earlier, this is clearly as close as the series has gotten to a Bond origin story, and it’s a banger.
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Casino Royale goes back to Fleming’s first novel and is the most faithful film in the series since 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—most of the films after that had used just a title and perhaps a few remixed story elements. The film also posits the question that has haunted Bond at various points throughout his career: Is this truly the life he wants to lead or is there something else out there for him? That choice is personified in Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), the government treasury official he falls in love with, and whose betrayal firmly sets him on the path to become “Bond, James Bond.”
Aside from Craig, Dench’s M, and Green (the best “Bond Woman” since Barbara Bach’s Agent Triple X in The Spy Who Loved Me), the movie introduces Jeffrey Wright as Bond’s CIA counterpart, Felix Leiter, who should have been used more in subsequent outings, and Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre, the villain with whom Bond matches wits more than fists. The 40-minute poker tournament at the center of the film between the two is a master class by Campbell and the writers in making a card game exciting and suspenseful to watch, with the stakes steadily increasing both at the table and away from it.
The fact that a card game is the major set-piece in the movie clearly validates the producers’ quest to veer away from the gadgets and the visual effects in favor of an earthier, grittier Bond, and combined with Craig’s rough-hewn, scrappy, and complex performance, the cumulative result was the kind of James Bond thriller that hadn’t been seen in literally decades. Casino Royale was an explosive, game-changing introduction to the now-finished Daniel Craig era, and whoever comes next is going to have one hell of a lot to live up to. But one thing is certain:
