Bond...Outstanding Bond

Thankfully, Bond is back.

The holiday movie season has begun in earnest for me as there are four or five movies that I want to see out in the theater for the first time since early summer: Stranger Than Fiction, Borat, Casino Royale, The Departed, and Fast Food Nation. Friday got me started into the season with a 4:15 Friday afternoon showing of the newest Bond flick: Casino Royale.

I am thrilled to say that this was easily the most enjoyable Bond movie in years - perhaps in decades. Daniel Craig carries himself as though he had been playing Bond for his entire life. Eva Green is gorgeous as Bond's love interest, and the story cracks with excitement and believability that have been lacking in the past half dozen Bond films.

Casino Royale has been written as a relaunch of the Bond franchise, returning the character to simpler roots and telling a tale of how he shifted from being James Bond to being Bond, James Bond, and the scribes have done a great job of distancing him from what has come before while staying true to the character and leaving in enough notes that show the building of the character that any Bond fan will consider things just right.

Spoiler warning: everything below should be read after seeing the film.

We open with Bond taking his second life and earning his double-O status and then move to Bond's first misstep as a double-O agent: entering a foreign embassy and killing an visibly unarmed captive on security camera footage that is given to the world press.

From there, the story begins in earnest with Bond picking up what will become his trademarks one by one: the Aston Martin, the martini - shaken, of course, the Walther PPK, and the tuxedo. Nothing seems forced, however, and Craig plays every discovery freshly and originally, bringing new life to a character that had become a suave parody of the interesting, rougher spy as which he had begun.

The traditional elements of a Bond film are all present: beautiful women, fast cars, card games, neat gadgets - but none of them are as over the top and ridiculous as they had begun to be in the last run of movies in the series. Instead of a hotel made of ice, we get a gorgeous, old-school European casino. Instead of a villian who threatens the world with a comandeered laser-firing spy sattelite, we get a villian whose job is to make money for terrorists.

Bond stops the bad guys through force of will and body, not through some form of pen that twists and becomes a helicopter. It's a refreshing change and is played straight, with almost none of the humor that had also come to become stale and trite in the run of Pierce Brosnan Bond films.

We enter the film knowing who James Bond was, and leave knowing that the overplayed, too suave for his own good super spy is no more.

The Bond is dead. Long live the Bond.