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 Casino
Royale
Screenplay by
Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
Second Set of Revisions by
Paul Haggis
December 13, 2005
Reviewed By Rich Drees
Any film franchise that wants to achieve any amount of longevity is
going to have to strike a balance between preserving the elements
that have captured the public’s imagination and making sure that the
series remains relevant with the passage of time. For better or
worse, the James Bond franchise has managed to keep evolving for
almost 45 years, striving to keep itself germane to the
ever-changing geo-political climate.
Born in the heart of the Cold War, both the original literary
incarnation of the character and his filmic equivalent found
themselves battling the machinations of communist agents and Soviet
assassins. But as the Cold War gave way to glasnost and the eventual
fall of the Soviet Union, the Bond series found itself dealing with
new concerns including drug dealers, terrorism and third-world
possession of weapons of mass destruction. And as these times have
changed so has the tenor of the series from the seriousness of the
early films starring Sean Connery to the tongue-in-cheek tone of the
Roger Moore-starring films to the grand adventure of the films
starring Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.
But now, the Bond franchise has taken advantage of their most recent
recasting of the role of James Bond, in the form of actor Daniel
Craig, to reinvigorate itself by going back to its beginnings and
exploring the circumstances that made him a cold-blooded killer. The
result is Casino Royale, a taut script which should make for
an exciting and gritty re-visioning of the franchise come the film’s
release this coming November.
Casino Royale
opens with a pre-credit sequence where we see Bond earning his
“Double-0” status by assassinating a British Intelligence agent and
his confederate who are selling state secrets. However, on his first
mission as a “Double-0” agent, Bond’s recklessness and arrogance
cause him to bungle the mission and he gets caught on camera killing
his target. Bond returns to England where he is dressed down by M
who tells him- “Any thug can kill. I need you to take your ego out
of the equation and judge the situation dispassionately.”
Although M should reprimand Bond, she needs him for a mission
involving a man named Le Chiffre, who stylized himself as providing
“reliable banking services” for various terrorist organizations. Le
Chiffre has made a fortune laundering money for terrorist groups
around the world by investing their money in the stock market and
then selling based on his knowledge of upcoming terrorist attacks.
However, after Bond disrupts a bomb attack on the unveiling of a new
model jet airliner, Le Chiffre finds his stock market manipulation
has backfired and is suddenly in need of several million dollars to
payout to the vicious leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Mr.
White. British Intelligence has learned that Le Chiffre plans to
make up his loss through a high stakes poker at the Casino Royale.
Bond, having been determined to be the best gambler in the service,
must stop Le Chiffre. Joining Bond on his mission is the beautiful
agent Vesper Lynn, tasked with making sure that Bond doesn’t gamble
away the stake he needs to buy into the card game with Le Chiffre.
The previous Bond films have kept a loose continuity amongst
themselves, with some characters and story points resurfacing from
various previous installments, even after several years have passed.
For Your Eyes Only (1981) opened with Bond finally dealing
with the man who murdered his just-wed wife at the end of 1969’s
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Even when returning characters
were portrayed by different actors - the series has gone through
more Felix Leiters as it did Bonds – this continuity helped to keep
Bond’s world a rich and diverse place.
However, Casino Royale takes a huge risk by wiping the slate
clean, taking the Bond to his earliest days as one of the top agents
in Britain’s MI6. But it is a risk that pays off well as it allows
the franchise to re-establish a new tone better suited for the 21st
century and its new leading man, Daniel Craig. All the familiar
elements are open to potential reinterpretation and many of these
elements are. While the Bond of Fleming’s novels is a misogynistic,
hard-hearted killer, the movies have definitely chipped away the
rougher edges of the character to make him more palatable to the
movie-going public. As reinvention of franchise, the script seems to
move films closer to the novels’ conceptualization of the character,
with a strong emphasis on the character arc of Bond’s transformation
into the misogynistic assassin of the books.
In addition, the action pieces are much more realistic, not relying
on grandiose and impossible action. The fights are brutal and gritty
such as Bond’s multiple flight staircase brawl with Obanno. The
script also acknowledges that this kind of brutality can affect
people, as encapsulated in a scene after the aforementioned
staircase brawl in which Bond confronts and traumatized Vesper who
is just realizing how close to death she had come. It’s a moment
where Bond lets down his cold demeanor and reads as a rather
understated but powerful story beat, which also effectively sets up
the third act tragedy that triggers the final hardening of Bond’s
heart.
Also stripped away are such series mainstays as Bond’s miraculous
gadgets and supporting characters Miss Moneypenny and harried
gadget-creator Q. Although the recurring character of CIA agent
Felix Leiter doesn’t appear in this draft of the script, the name
has appeared in published cast lists, leaving me to suspect that at
least one more pass through the script has been made, if only to
change the name of a CIA agent Bond encounters from Wolpert to
Leiter. Also, in a possible appeasement to fans that might be
missing Bond’s gadgets and supporting cast, the script does show us
Bond acquiring a classic Aston-Martin sports car and his first
custom-tailored tuxedo.
If script has any weak points, it’s that it only hints at an almost
mother/son relationship between Bond and M and the toll that Bond’s
character transformation takes on M. Early in the film, Bond’s
conversations with M clearly boarder on insubordination, but M
clearly lets it slide, even when Bond breaks into her home and
reveals that he knows her real name. The script also hints at her
feelings towards Bond at the end of the film when, after telling him
some information that crushes his heart a little bit more than the
other tragic events of the third act already have, it states that M
knows “she’s just sacrificed a man to create a spy, and for the
briefest of moments, [is] not necessarily happy with herself.”
There is one other problem with the script, and that is the
substitution of the novel’s centerpiece baccarat card game with
Texas Hold ‘Em poker. While it is understandable that the filmmakers
would want to present a card game that a majority of the audience
would be able to follow without explanation. However, one thing that
has remained constant through the whole Bond series has been the
sense of exoticism. The films take the viewer to far away locales to
see things they might not normally be able to see, be it the canals
of Venice, remote Swiss skiing chalets or the beaches of Thailand.
To see Bond playing a game that anyone in the audience could play in
their own kitchen seems a bit pedestrian for even a Bond film this
gritty and down-to-Earth.
If production can pull off the script’s tone, it should surprise a
lot of people. There’s a hard-edged tone that is far more suited to
today’s political climate than the grand adventure of more recent
installments. However, this reinvention may also divide fans of
series, splitting those who enjoy the more polished, escapist
version of the character and those who will welcome a film that hews
closer to Fleming’s books. |
