The Hindu Business Line : Rough and ready to Bond

The good news about the latest Bond offering is that the movie and the actor bring back some of the shine to the franchise. Casino Royale is a Bond movie in the old tradition, where the action and the gadgetry never overwhelm the man.

HIGH STAKES: Eva Green and Daniel Craig in 'Casino Royale'.

Halfway through the glittering premier of Casino Royale in New Delhi last week, a representative of a Hollywood company, and a huge fan of the Bond franchise, muttered doubtfully when asked what he thought — "this doesn't have enough action, what kind of a Bond movie is this?"

By then, Daniel Craig, the newest Bond on the block has only blown up an African embassy after a thrilling chase, and killed a couple of guys. He has also bedded a lovely, having got rid of her inconvenient husband, another of those things on the Bond to-do list. For this writer, he is a joy to behold, because he is doing what Bond does best: pulp the bad guys into extinction, doing it with an unswerving purpose, blue eyes blazing and perfectly toned body all to the fore. This is a Bond bringing the dying franchise to life, and an answer to all those doubters who had started whingeing about the significance of James Bond in this day and age.

But what the Hollywood rep and people like him were missing were the outsized villains, the amazing gadgets, and the blinding pyrotechnics. You know, those parts of the movie, when Bond would be led into a secret part of his workplace and shown off the latest tool by which he could save the world: remember that invisible car in the 1999 The World Is Not Enough, in which Bond whizzed about in an icy cave, bamboozling the bad guys?

He was only voicing the reaction of a whole band of viewers who have seen Her Majesty's favourite spy played by Pierce Brosnan, who came at Double O Seven as a good-looking dandy playing with guns and babes with equal dexterity. Brosnan brought the Bond movies out of the quagmire they had got stuck in, post the Roger Moore-in-the-decline phase. And, horrors, one hideous aberration, when the original Bond, Sean Connery (Never Say Never Again), was hauled back from retirement.

But Brosnan's smoothness started to grate, after a while. And like Moore, he started playing the superspy for laughs, with a knowing twinkle in the eye, which was fine for a couple of movies, but not when the tics started to stretch out interminably.

There have been other Bonds, like Timothy Dalton (The Living Daylights) and George Lazenby (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), but there has never been one like Sean Connery. Right from the first smash hit of the franchise, Dr No (Casino Royale was the first Bond book that Ian Fleming wrote, but for complicated reasons, to do with film rights and so on, got made into a movie only now, 44 years after the first Bond. Connery had enough star appeal, and raw magnetism to carry off the role of a spy who was licensed to kill — in order to keep the British Flag flying, and of course, to save the world, in that order.

Connery was a perfect fit for Bond, and kept the series kicking through, notably with From Russia With Love, Diamonds Are Forever, and a couple of others. By then, it was time for him to move on, and for Moore to take the Bond myth forward. He was a good Bond, too: The Spy Who Loved Me was a classic Bond, with a super vile villain, a whole series of eager lasses all lusting after Bond, and lots and lots of exciting situations.

Pierce Brosnan, a crinkly-eyed charmer, hefted the role with an ease that immediately appealed to a whole bunch of younger viewers who looked upon sophistication as the biggest asset of a Bond: by the end, Brosnan was sending up his Bonds, with a self-amused smile.

Also by then, the action movies had been taken over by much younger and much bigger stars. Tom Cruise's first of the Mission Impossible films pushed the envelope much farther than any Bond had done (stagey villains in their stagier dens started reminding you of Bollywood movies which tried to emulate the Bonds, but failed miserably: Amrish Puri's loud `Shakaals' and `Mogambos' were any day better value for money). Cruise was classy, and the bad guys were classier still, and the action was mind-blowing.

And as far as the blood and gore went, that was totally taken over by Quentin Tarantino and his cohorts. Tarantino took spraying blood and guts over a screen to a grotesque art form: his Reservoir Dogs re-wrote the rules of gut-wrenching torture forever. By comparison, Bond looked pale and anaemic. And a guy who was quite out of it.

The good news about the latest Bond offering is that the movie and the actor bring back some of the shine to the franchise. Craig plays it like he means it: the first time he makes a kill, he uses his hands and feet to pummel the baddie into submission, and drowns him in a washbasin full of filthy water in an even filthier toilet. This is how Bond started out, says the movie: the smoothness came much, much later. But Fleming's Bond was never meant to be a playboy smoothie, he was meant to be rough and ready.

Craig is both. He shows an enormous appetite to kill, and treats it as serious business. He also takes his other mission — to roll about in the hay with gorgeous women — equally seriously. Casino Royale is a Bond movie in the old tradition, where the action and the gadgetry never overwhelm the man. He is perfectly poised to take over the ground taken over by Cruise and Matt Damon, in his Bourne Identity Series, where things are not so dark and muddled and confusing and ambiguous, where the good is good, and bad is very, very bad.

But how this will grab viewers, who were hooked on to the much-less threatening persona of Brosnan and all those terrific little toys, is something that must be keeping the big boys in Hollywood on the edge of their seat. Will this be a Bond with the best, or a Bond just like the rest?