It’s 20 years since Casino Royale hit James Bond fans like Daniel Craig smashing through a wall. Directed by Martin Campbell, the 007 reboot remains a phenomenal piece of action cinema – a film that left the Bond formula shaken (perhaps even stirred) while masterfully adapting the original Ian Fleming novel into a perfectly of-the-moment blockbuster. Craig’s five-film tenure would go on to earn $3.9bn at the box office. But – box office aside – did Casino Royale save Bond? Or did it light the fuse that ultimately destroyed the Bond film as we knew it?
With the reveal of the new 007 actor supposedly imminent – along with the series’ next big reinvention – Bond 26 director Denis Villeneuve and Amazon MGM Studios should note how difficult it is to satisfy all the franchise’s fans.
For some purists, Casino Royale is the last decent Bond film before Craig’s tenure became overly serious – joyless, one might say – and strayed too far from a formula that made the Bond film its own genre and which is really the chief pleasure of the series: the gadgets, the girls, the saucy one-liners, the tried-and-tested structure. Reddit threads and X posts have been dedicated to the topic of Craig’s divisive era, with fans on both sides of the argument debating the merits of Casino Royale and the rest of the Craig run: the tricky second act of Quantum of Solace (2008), the creative and commercial high point of Skyfall (2012), the terrible let-down of Spectre (2015), and the pleased-with-itself swansong of No Time to Die (2021).
Some fans might even debate whether Casino Royale itself – clearly modelled on the close-quarters, hand-to-hand action and realism of the Bourne films – feels like a real Bond film. “Yes and no,” says John Rain, the host of film podcast Smersh Pod and author of Thunderbook, about the Bond films. “It has the feel of one, but I do hate that it’s a ‘reboot’ – as was the style at the time – and I feel it painted his tenure into a corner. I do wish they’d just carried on in the same way as always. New Bond, new plot, same world.”
In a Reddit thread on how Casino Royale changed the series, one fan called it the “best Bond film ever”, while another said it “changed the Bond films into a different genre of film”. One fan took aim at its influence on the subsequent films – the idea that every film was now about Bond’s trauma: “He’s angry, charmless, joyless, reactionary the whole way. He never becomes the Bond we knew.”
Ian Kinane from the University of Roehampton, editor of The International Journal of James Bond Studies, disagrees. Casino Royale, he says, is “one of the most important films in the entire Bond canon”.
Looking back to the early 2000s, there’s no doubt that Bond needed Casino Royale at that time. Pierce Brosnan had brought the character bang into the Nineties with the Cool Britannia-defining GoldenEye (1995), but the Brosnan era hit a silly nadir with his fourth and final outing, Die Another Day (2002), notorious for its invisible car and soul-curdling Madonna song.
The formula had gone too far, entering a realm of silliness to which even Roger Moore would have raised a cheeky eyebrow. Eon producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson – the daughter and stepson, respectively, of longtime Bond film impresario Albert “Cubby” Broccoli – decided they had to look back to take the films forward, and turned to Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel. Published in 1953, Casino Royale sees Bond play a high-stakes baccarat game against the shady Le Chiffre, a money man for a communist outfit. Meanwhile, 007 falls in love with Vesper Lynd, who turns out to be a reluctant traitor and kills herself.
In Casino Royale, Bond falls in love with Vesper Lynd, played by Eva Green – Alamy/Collection Christophel
The incessant need for origin stories has since become the bane of Hollywood, but it made sense in the context of Bond’s natural filmic lifecycle. Every once in a while, Bond goes OTT and makes a mockery of himself – as happened with Die Another Day – and receives orders to get back to basics. Or in the case of Casino Royale, back to the beginning.
Realising that it needed a fresh start, Eon replaced Brosnan with Daniel Craig. His casting was met with resistance from some quarters of the press and Bond fandom – mainly because Craig had blond hair – but he was an inspired choice. Charming and brutish in equal measure, Craig was a Bond who was capable of all the action – and killing – required for Queen and country. “Instead of presenting the polished, fully formed 007 of the classic formula, it asks how Bond becomes Bond,” says Kinane.
Elizabeth II meeting Craig at the royal premiere of Casino Royale in November 2006 – Ian Jones
Premiering on November 14 2006, Casino Royale was stunningly, disarmingly good. Just as GoldenEye had repositioned Bond for the Nineties (“A sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War,” said Judi Dench’s M) while indulging in all the fun and frolics of the classic Bond film, Casino Royale updated the series for a post-9/11 world. Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) became a money man for very modern terrorists, and Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) was recast as a treasury liaison who bankrolls Bond’s card game (updated to poker), and whose chief concern is that should Bond lose, the British government would effectively be funding terrorism.
In terms of pure cinematic pleasure, Casino Royale was a crucial update in style of film, too. Most fans would point to the early crane-climbing action sequence, in which Bond chases down a free-running bomb maker (played by parkour pioneer Sébastien Foucan), as the game-changing moment – a daring, full-throttle, vertigo-inducing set-piece. “The moment when Craig’s Bond literally runs through a wall rather than deal with this parkour nonsense was the moment it had me,” admits podcaster Rain.
But everything you need to know about Casino Royale and what it sets out to do comes even earlier – before Chris Cornell’s superb You Know My Name theme hits. Indeed, Casino Royale‘s pre-title sequence dumps the traditional big action stunt-fest and replaces it with a black-and-white sequence that shows us how Bond earned his Double-O status – a cold-blooded assassination and a gruelling fistfight flashback – which ends with a twist on the famous gun barrel. It’s a clear statement of intent, and the first of several Bond subversions peppered throughout the film. “What’s fascinating is that Casino Royale doesn’t reject the formula so much as postpone it,” says Kinane. “Many of the familiar Bondian elements are present, but in embryonic form.”
We see how Bond gets his first Aston Martin DB5 – a gadget-free version that Bond wins in a poker game – and when asked whether he wants his vodka martini shaken or stirred, he replies “Do I look like I give a damn?” And the badly burnt bomber who can scurry up cranes isn’t that far removed from the butler who throws a razor-tipped bowler hat. Those nods to Bond tradition build to the final, most satisfying trope of all, as Bond takes out the baddie and finally says, “The name’s Bond, James Bond”, at which point the classic Bond theme – gently teased throughout – blasts out. Director Martin Campbell said that moment was “like an orgasm”.
As a standalone film, Casino Royale is tremendous. But it created a blueprint for what arguably became something else, as Craig’s Bond veered into territory that felt like any old blockbuster franchise. Subsequent films, hung up on Casino Royale, became concerned with trivial matters such as story arcs and character development – things that were largely beneath Bond in years gone by.
Skyfall is the outlier in the post-Casino Royale films in that it’s a treatment on Bond history, marking the series’s 50th anniversary. I would argue that Skyfall learnt the right lessons from Casino Royale and did a similar thing in reverse: Casino Royale played around with the Bond elements; Skyfall put them back in place. Rain, however, thinks that by this point Craig’s era had become “tiresome very quickly”. He adds: “[To go] from a reboot in 2006 to a knackered old horse ready for pasture in 2012 was deeply annoying – especially as that was only three films. It all just lacked heart and fun. It felt very much like it was all being steered by a therapist.”
The smart reinventions that began with Casino Royale led to Spectre‘s cack-handed reimagining of arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (now played by Christoph Waltz), who became Bond’s jealous adoptive brother. (Whatever happened to just wanting to blow up the world for the fun of it?) Making his official return to the films after 44 years, Blofeld was – like Spectre in its entirety – a colossal disappointment. It “makes Die Another Day feel like a masterpiece,” says Rain.
Worse, though, the Casino Royale realism that revitalised Bond morphed into a dour grumpiness. “By the time we landed in Spectre it was just an endless parade of Bond being ‘haunted by his past’,” says Rain. “No fun was being had by anyone, especially not Bond.” None of which was helped by Craig’s occasional comments that made it sound like playing cinema’s premier super-spy was, in fact, a bit of a drag. After Spectre, Craig joked that he would rather “slash [his] wrists” than make another Bond film. The actor later revealed that he had suggested killing Bond as far back as 2006 – right after the Casino Royale German premiere – which Craig finally did with No Time to Die. Nothing could be farther from “proper” Bond than 007 being killed – no matter how many missiles are coming his way, as happens at the end of No Time to Die. Moore would have got himself out of that predicament while wearing a safari suit.
No Time to Die was the closest to a classic Bond caper of Craig’s post-Casino Royale films, with its megalomaniac nutter (Rami Malek), secret villain’s lair, and silly tech. But the series was by now so driven by the journey from personal trauma to inner peace that it made the character a wannabe family man – something that made Craig’s iteration almost unrecognisable as Bond.
Ian Kinane is more positive, noting that each Bond’s new era is different from the last. “What matters most is whether the films retain the core tensions of the character,” he says. “Sophistication and brutality, duty and individualism, professionalism and personal vulnerability. On that level, I think the Craig era unquestionably remains Bond.”
Now that Amazon has taken the reins of the franchise, the fear is that its algorithm-driven need for “content” – in addition to the Broccoli family, so integral to the Bond formula, ceding creative control – will see the Bond series fully morph into a different kind of film, one that bears no resemblance to classic 007. But it’s arguably already happened – Casino Royale might already have fired the kill shot as James Bond’s last truly great adventure.
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