Bondage and Discipline

Hey, we promised you an unavoidable week of James Bond-related posts, didn’t we? So check out Anthony Lane’s review of the upcoming film Casino Royale in The New Yorker. It causes us to rethink (a bit) our fear that firing Pierce Brosnan from the lead role, in favor of Daniel Craig, was a disaster of Republican midterm proportions. An excerpt:

Things have been so moribund for so long in the Bond business that it was always going to take some major defibrillation to jerk it back to life. “Die Another Day,” the last film, was a gruelling nadir, although the producers would be right to point out that it earned four hundred and fifty million dollars, which is three times the purse that Bond and Le Chiffre battle for at the tables [in the new film]. This means that the sight of Pierce Brosnan driving an invisible car, though bound to dismay every Bond-revering adult, was catnip to the larger constituency of teen-age boys, who were comfortable with a film that felt like a video game. What they will make of “Casino Royale”--no babes, no toyland, and the poker not even online--is anyone’s guess, but the earnings of the new film will doubtless affect the look, and the casting, of the next. If Craig falters, then I guess it’s full speed ahead to Chris Rock as 007 and Borat as Blofeld. That would be a shame, because “Casino Royale,” though half an hour too long, is the first semi-serious stab at Fleming, and at the treacherous terrain that he marked out, since “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” in 1969. Like that film, this one ends in despair.

Read Lane’s full critique here.

READ MORE: “45 Years of Bondage: A History of Bond Films--Part One,” by Kevin Kelly (Cinematical).