10 / 10
The Film That Saved Bond
Casino Royale is the film that saved James Bond. Four years earlier, Die Another Day had given Bond an invisible car, a villain who changed his race with gene therapy and a computer-generated surfing sequence, and the series had nowhere left to go. The producers stopped, threw out almost everything, and went back to the beginning: Ian Fleming’s first novel, published in 1953, about a young agent, a card game and a woman who betrays him.
Martin Campbell directed it, the same man who had rebooted the series once before with GoldenEye in 1995. Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis wrote it. It came out in November 2006, made more than six hundred million dollars, and sits beside Skyfall at the top of the whole series. It’s a 10.
The film treats Bond as a man who can be hurt, and that’s why it sits at the top of my list with Skyfall. Die Another Day had turned him into a cartoon. Here he bleeds, gets fooled and gets his heart broken, and I buy every minute of it.
Black and White
It opens in Prague, in grainy black and white.
Bond walks into the office of a traitorous section chief and waits for him in the dark. They talk. Intercut with the conversation is a flashback to Bond’s first kill: a contact in a filthy public bathroom, a brutal, clumsy, desperate fight that ends with Bond drowning the man in a sink.
Two kills earn a double-0 status, the section chief explains, and Bond has only made one. Then Bond shoots him, and the famous gun barrel sequence arrives at the end of the scene instead of the start, with the dying man in the frame. The series had never opened this way, and in four minutes it announced exactly what kind of Bond this was going to be.
It’s a bold way to open a Bond film, and it tells you immediately that the rules have changed. There’s no quip, no gadget and no glamor. Just a young man learning what killing feels like, and deciding he can live with it.
For Writers
The opening shows Bond’s first two kills, one clean and one desperate, and the gun barrel arrives at the end of the scene. In four minutes the film tells you who this Bond is.
When you write an opening, the most effective ones don’t explain a character. They show a single action that defines them. Write your opening around one choice your character makes that no one else in the story would make. Let the reader draw the conclusion without help. My piece on opening pages that hook readers digs into this.
The Craig Controversy
Before the film came out, Daniel Craig was the most mocked Bond casting in history. He was too short, too blond, too rough, not handsome enough, and he couldn’t drive a manual car, according to a gleeful press. A website campaigned against him, and fans promised to boycott the film.
Inside a week, the film made the campaign look ridiculous. Craig’s Bond is physical, cold and very good at violence, and he isn’t the finished article yet. He’s arrogant, careless and too pleased with himself, and the film’s story is how he becomes the man we already know. By the end, Craig owned the role, and the critics who’d mocked him were calling him the best Bond since Connery.
Craig also did a lot of his own physical work, and you can see it. When he runs, falls and fights, you believe it’s him, and you believe it hurts. That physical honesty set the tone for his whole run.
Madagascar
The first big set piece is a chase through a construction site in Madagascar. Bond is following a bomb-maker played by Sébastien Foucan, one of the founders of free running, and Foucan moves across the site like water, up a crane, along girders, through gaps no human should fit, leaping between cranes a hundred feet up.
Bond follows by brute force: through walls, on a bulldozer, straight across the gaps Foucan danced over. It’s the whole character contrast of the film in four minutes, grace against bloody-minded determination. It ends with Bond storming into an embassy, shooting his target in front of the cameras and causing a diplomatic incident. M is furious. We’re thrilled.
The parkour chase is my favorite opening action sequence in the whole series. Foucan is doing things that look impossible, and Craig answering all that grace by driving a bulldozer through a wall is the funniest thing in the film to me.
Miami Airport
The trail leads to Le Chiffre, a banker who invests terrorists’ money, and his plan to short the stock of an airline manufacturer and then blow up its new prototype airliner at Miami airport. Bond stops the bomber on the runway in a long, cleverly staged sequence built around a runaway fuel tanker careering across the airfield and a fight on the moving truck.
Le Chiffre loses a fortune of his clients’ money, and he needs to win it back before they kill him. That’s what sends everyone to Montenegro, and it’s a smart piece of plotting: the villain is desperate, not triumphant, and his desperation drives the rest of the film.
Vesper Lynd
On the train to Montenegro, Bond meets Vesper Lynd, the Treasury agent sent to watch the money, and the two of them size each other up across a dinner table. She reads him perfectly: his school, his background, his chip on the shoulder, his need to prove himself. He reads her just as well. The scene is written and played like the best screwball comedy, and it’s the moment the film tells you this relationship matters.
Eva Green is the best thing in the film after Craig, and I’d put Vesper above every other woman the series has written. She’s clever, guarded and damaged, and she’s the only woman in the series who is Bond’s equal in every scene. Their love story is real, and the film takes its time with it, so the ending hurts.
Their banter on the train is the best-written exchange in any Bond film, sharp, funny and full of mutual suspicion. Each of them sees straight through the other, and neither can resist showing it.
For Writers
Bond and Vesper read each other across the dinner table on the train. The scene sets up their whole relationship in a few minutes of sharp dialogue.
In a meeting between two important characters, polite small talk wastes the scene. The strongest first meetings are contests. Have your two characters try to work each other out in their first scene, and let each land at least one accurate observation that stings.
The Poker Game
The middle of the film is a high-stakes game of Texas hold ’em at the casino in Montenegro. Le Chiffre needs to win back his clients’ money, and Bond, staked by the Treasury, needs to beat him so that Le Chiffre has to turn to the British government for protection.
It shouldn’t work. Poker isn’t visual, and the game runs across a large part of the film. Campbell makes it riveting. Bond loses a fortune, is poisoned with a spiked martini, nearly dies in his car using a defibrillator, and walks back to the table. When the Treasury won’t give him more money, Jeffrey Wright’s Felix Leiter stakes him. The final hand is as tense as any action scene in the series.
The switch from the novel’s baccarat to Texas hold ’em was a smart piece of updating. The poker boom was at its height in 2006, and audiences understood the game well enough to follow every bluff and every big hand.
The Vesper Martini
At the table, Bond orders a martini and dictates the recipe: three measures of gin, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet, shaken, with a thin slice of lemon peel. Then he names it after Vesper.
It’s straight from Fleming, and it’s one of the film’s quiet moments of character. This Bond is inventing himself, and we’re watching him do it. Later, asked whether he wants his martini shaken or stirred, he snaps that he doesn’t care. The trademarks of the character are arriving one at a time, each for a reason, and each one costs him something.
For Writers
The martini, the name and the indifference to shaken or stirred each arrive during the story, and the film earns each one. The film shows the trademarks being born.
For an origin story, readers already know the character’s famous traits. The interest lies in seeing where each one comes from.
List your character’s signature habits, and give each one a scene where it first appears, tied to something that happens to them in the story.
Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre
Mads Mikkelsen gives the series its most human villain in decades.
Le Chiffre is a gifted mathematician who has lost other people’s money and is running out of time to get it back. He has a scarred eye that weeps blood and an asthma inhaler he uses at the table, and he’s frightened. That makes him more dangerous.
The scene where his clients visit his hotel room with a machete, and threaten to take his girlfriend’s arm, shows exactly how precarious his position is. He’s trying to survive the week. That makes him easier to believe than almost any Bond villain before him.
Mikkelsen plays him with a stillness that makes the small gestures matter: the inhaler, the flicker of fear when his clients appear, the tiny smile when he thinks he’s won. It’s a villain built from details, and he became a star internationally on the strength of it.
The Chair
Le Chiffre captures Bond, strips him, ties him to a chair with the seat cut out, and beats him with a knotted rope. It comes straight from Fleming’s novel, and it’s the most famous scene in the film, partly for its brutality and partly because Bond, in agony, laughs at him and mocks him throughout.
It was more brutal than anything the series had shown before, and it told audiences that the reboot meant it. It also shows us the thing that makes Craig’s Bond work: his refusal to give an inch, even when he has nothing left.
The scene works because Craig makes Bond’s defiance feel like a choice, something more than bravado. He’s in agony, and he’s laughing at the man hurting him, because laughing is the only weapon he has left, and he knows it drives Le Chiffre mad.
I wince through the chair scene, and I wouldn’t cut a second of it. Craig laughing at the man torturing him sells him as Bond for me more than any tuxedo could.
Venice
The ending takes place in Venice, where Vesper’s betrayal is revealed and a house under renovation collapses into the Grand Canal. Vesper is trapped in a sinking lift cage, and Bond tries to reach her. She chooses to drown.
Afterward, Bond calls M and says a cold line about her that comes straight from Fleming’s last page.
It’s the moment he becomes the Bond we know. Then comes the final scene, at a villa on Lake Como, where Bond finds the man behind everything, shoots him in the leg and finally introduces himself by his full name as the theme plays for the first time. It’s the best ending of any Bond film.
That full name at the very end gives me chills. The film holds back the introduction and the theme for its entire running time and then spends both in one scene, and I can’t think of a better reward for patience in any franchise.
Where the Story Went Next
A single story ran across Daniel Craig’s five films, and Casino Royale was its start. Quantum of Solace, released two years later, picks up about an hour after the final scene, with Mr. White in the boot of Bond’s car, and follows Bond’s search for the organization behind Vesper’s betrayal.
That organization, Quantum, was later folded into SPECTRE, and the thread of Vesper’s death runs all the way to No Time to Die in 2021, where Bond visits her grave in Italy before his own story ends. No earlier Bond had a continuous arc, a beginning, middle and end, and Casino Royale is where it began.
It also changed what audiences expected from the series. After this film, Bond could grieve, fail, bleed and die, and the films that followed took those possibilities seriously. That shift started with a card game in Montenegro and a woman in a sinking lift.
Watched in order, the five Craig films form a single long story about a man who is damaged by love early and spends the rest of his career refusing to risk it again. Casino Royale is the foundation of all of it, and the later films lean on it constantly.
What Casino Royale Gets Right
The producers made one brave decision: they let the film be about how Bond became Bond. The quips, the martini, the name and the coldness all arrive during the story, and each one is earned through loss. The result is a film that works for someone who has never seen a Bond, and one that recharges every older film for anyone who has.
Chris Cornell’s You Know My Name plays over titles built from playing cards, and Quantum of Solace followed as a direct sequel two years later. Skyfall is the only other Bond I’d rate as highly.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Instead of presenting its hero finished, Casino Royale builds him. Bond starts arrogant and careless, and the story turns him into the cold agent the audience already knows.
With an origin, the reader often knows the destination. The interest is in the cost of getting there. List the traits your character has at the end, then give each one a scene in which it’s earned through a loss. If a trait has no scene, write one.
The Verdict on Casino Royale
Yes. It’s a 10, and with Skyfall it’s the best of the Bond films. My one small gripe is that the Miami airport sequence runs a few minutes longer than it needs to after Madagascar has already set the bar that high. Everything else works for me: Craig, Green, Mikkelsen, the card game, the chair and that ending. If you’ve only ever seen the older ones, start here to see what the character can be, then watch Skyfall to see where he ends up.
