MSWallack Blog

I'd like to give this film 10 stars, but Spout limits me to a mere 5. Casino Royale deserved as many stars as are available. It deserved Academy Award consideration (heck, it received the best cumulative reviews of the year for a wide-release film according to Rotten Tomatoes (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/features/rtawards/). This is a hard movie for me to review objectively. I have been a huge (no, I mean huge) James Bond fan since the mid-1970s and, while I am huge film of the movies, I am an even bigger fan of the books. So, to finally see the James Bond that Ian Fleming wrote about on the big screen was something that I've been waiting to see for thirty years (am I really that old?). And make no mistake, Daniel Craig's James Bond was absolutely (excepting only the blonde hair) the character that Ian Fleming created, simply advanced in time by 50+ years. In addition, the story was much closer to the novel Casino Royale than have been most of the movies (especially the more recent ones). In fact, the central part of the film was very, very closely based upon the novel with the beginning and end serving as excellent bookends around that central story. It was also great to see Vesper Lynd treated as a character rather than a cardboard "Bond girl". I could write about Casino Royale at length (and perhaps I will someday). For the time being, let me simply state that Casino Royale was a spectacularly good movie and Daniel Craig was a spectacularly good James Bond.