Newswheel review: Back-to-basics Bond blows
Newswheel staff :: 17 November 2006 :: Filed under Aston Martin, Aston Martin DBS
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Aston Martin vehicle?
What to make of the latest Bond flick, Casino Royale, which opened yesterday at cinemas across the UK? With the usual broadsheet, tv-based and online suspects already on record with a largely uniform line of raised thumbs, and with the prospect of plenty of Aston Martin-branded car porn, Newswheel tooled into town with high hopes. Gritty, emotional, gripping, even realistic. 007 for grown ups, in other words, was the pre-show buzz.
Of course, the usual format for a film review typically involves carefully crafted prose, peppered with witty and insightful observations and building inexorably to a subtly argued conclusion. But frankly, this gruesome movie doesn’t deserve that sort of treatment. The high profile critics couldn’t have got it more wrong. Casino Royale is garish, boring, loud, stupid, excessively lengthy, clunky, cheesy, incompetent, crass, disjointed, cynical, mercenary, misguided, amateurish, clichéd and formulaic. And contrary to expectation, it’s recognisably Bond. But for all the wrong reasons. If you must know why, read on…
Pass the cheese: Daniel Craig’s signature moment as Bond
For starters, ignore the first five minutes, replete as it is with black and white tones, a Smirnoff vodka ad vibe and artsy-fartsy, film-student camera handling. Surely, you will feel, they can’t sustain it. And surely, you will discover, they can’t. In terms of cinematography, the remainder of the film is completely standard, mid-budget action flick fare.
And in many regards, Casino Royale is likewise plain old Bond. The opening chase sequence is highly stylised, utterly ridiculous and involves our James eventually rejecting conventional modes of pursuit in favour of a spectacular, but thoroughly silly, mechanised alternative. Straight out of the MI6 toolbox, in other words.
Just beachy
But it’s not until the early beach scene which introduces the inevitable femme fatale / bad-guy’s-squeeze character that any expectation the film makers intended to make an even remotely sensible movie is completely blown apart. Laden with intentional innuendo it may well be. But surely it wasn’t supposed to look like a bad promotional ad spot for a Caribbean island, circa 1992?
Thus begins this film’s lengthy litany of crimes against your intelligence. Next up is the score. It’s nothing more than the usual patronising, insulting, heavy-handed, cheese-soaked cacophony. At every turn the film hammers you over the head with mood music, never once allowing mere visuals to communicate on their own strengths. When the central bad guy first appears on screen, for instance, it’s not enough that he arrives with a fleet of black Land Rovers, has slick Brylcreemed hair, a milky, damaged eye and a glue-on scar. Oh no. There’s a menacing sound track to match. It’s mind numbing, exquisitely clichéd stuff.
There’s the Aston Martin. Where’s Q?
But not, it must be said, as insidious as the hundred weight of product placement under which Casino Royale labours. Exactly how much Ford paid for the literally undisguised and totally unforgivable New Mondeo ad that was clumsily shoehorned into the first half of the film, we may never know. But the deal clearly also included a hilariously high number of casual walk-on parts for the rest of the Ford Premier Automotive Group portfolio. Chuck a Walther PPK over your shoulder in the Casino Royale universe, and likely as not, you take out half a dozen Jag XJs and Rangie Sports. Movie-based product placement is always unfortunate, but this is as unsubtle and offensive as it gets.
The limited airtime given to the Bond’s signature wheels – the Aston DBS in this case – is therefore deliciously ironic. A brutal ragging from a cold start (note to Newswheel staff, never buy a second hand Aston from a secret agent with no sense of mechanical sympathy) and a swift and messy demise after a minute or so on screen pretty much sums up the DBS’s lot. The humble Mondeo gets more celluloid-based luvin’.
As for the gratuitous proliferation of Sony Ericsson smartphones and Sony Vaio laptops, the less said the better.
Painful plotting
And that’s not even mentioning the piss poor pacing (75 per cent frantic-but-repetitive action scenes, 25 per cent interminable, tension-free poker-playing paff, 100 per cent ludicrous globe-hopping locations), the messy splurge of half-formed ideas, contrived plot devices and the utterly incongruous dialogue, airdropped in simply to set up one liners (look out for the “little finger” gag, it’s a corker). Even the much vaunted testicle torture scene is reduced to facile slapstick by the infantile script writers’ inability to keep a straight face. Oh OK, the brutal humour in that sequence works well enough. But it’s a reminder that this in no new age Bond flick. It’s the same old cheese.
All of which will leave you wondering why the hell anyone is claiming Casino Royale is a departure from Bond’s passim. Well, it adds up to this. They’ve largely defenestrated the gadgets. And there are a grand total of two passages in which we see everyone’s favourite supine secret agent as a human being and not a cartoon character. The first is the shower scene with Bond consoling his half-catatonic romantic muse, Vesper Lynd (played by the intelligent, though dubious of accent, Eva Green). Chalk that up for about 30 seconds. The second is a brief moment of soul searching introspection in front of the mirror. Add another 10 clicks of pathos. In sum, it amounts to little and does nothing more than provide a glimpse of the far superior film Casino Royale could have been.
The main man
And what of Daniel Craig himself, initially much maligned and now much acclaimed in the iconic double-o role? Well, the film’s failings can hardly be blamed on him. But while we’re in the mood, suffice to say that his hilariously stacked physique is something of an impediment to a convincing outing as Bond. For starters, the maintenance of guns as finely polished as Craig’s is a full time job. One does not jetset about the globe doing one’s spying thing, all the while sustaining a double-D sized pair of pecs and a five-hours-a-day gym habit. Pedantry aside, Craig’s build lends a cartoonish, superhero dimension to a character that has always been as much brains as brawn.
One careful owner
More problematical is the damage it does to Bond’s basic sense of style. An overgrown monkey squeezed into a shiny suit is the overall effect. Or perhaps a cheap thug in naff Hugo Boss threads. Or even a Soviet gymnast in stretchy, pantomime costumes. Take your pick. Either way, his stylistic short fallings are an apt metaphor for the film’s fundamental failings.
Still, painting a convincing picture of an upper-middle class secret agent has been well beyond the capabilities of the franchise’s incumbents for some time. And in Casino Royale their ineptitude reaches an all new low. The crass conversation in which Vesper Lynd suggests the cut of his suit marks him out as an Oxford man is cringe worthiness as fine art.
So, it’s messy, badly written, stylistically off key, heaving with crass dialogue (check out the painful commentary during the poker game) and displays a level of basic film making incompetence that must surely be enough to make able but unemployed film makers want to firebomb prep schools out of pure frustration.
Do not, therefore, go to Casino Royale thinking it’s back-to-basics Bond with grit and realism. It is nothing of the sort. In fact, just don’t go to Casino Royale.
Posted 18 November 2006, by Andrzej Bania
Bond, overall, is hardly original...
...but a pants remake of the worst Bond movie ever shot - using an actor who is scared of water etc...
...surely Mr Brocoletti will be turning in his ciabatti