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In college, I spent a semester in London with a small group of American undergraduates. One of our professors, an American expat, could joke with the best of us but was also a brilliant international affairs scholar. At the beginning of every class we'd chat about our adventures and the idiosyncrasies of Britain until the professor, inevitably, said: "Right." We didn't know what that mean, exactly -- I still don't -- but gradually we learned that it signaled we were to get down to business.
Someone in the James Bond franchise must have said that somewhere between the last installment and Casino Royale. I confess I haven't seen that previous movie; I stopped paying attention to 007 somewhere around the first Pierce Brosnan movie. I thought he made a fine old-school Bond, but I just wasn't interested enough in the character to spend two hours with him anymore. The gadgetry had started to seem geeky, a quality that didn't fit Bond's character, and the self-parody had been permanently outdone by Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. International thrillers are a Euro a dozen now, and the pitch-black Bourne Supremacy set a new Polonium-210 standard that even this movie can't reach. But with Daniel Craig and a newly serious team, Bond has been reborn for a new era.
These days, we're simultaneously jaded and afraid. International madmen aren't an abstraction, they're a realistic threat. Into this messy state of affairs comes a beefy, unamused agent with something to prove. Nothing's said about this 007's origins except in a bit of speculation, but it's written all over his face and accent. The friend I saw Casino Royale with, who likes the new Bond as much as I do, hit the nail on the head: He looks Australian. But along with his raw good looks and well-filmed brawn, Craig's Bond has a physical grace and agility that does a lot of the work of setting Casino Royale afire. You wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of this guy, with or without his Aston-Martin.
Martin Campbell's direction is sharp without drawing undo attention to itself, as are the supporting cast. Eva Green's Vesper Lynd, a British treasury official, has more substance than the typical "Bond girl," and Mads Mikkelsen is duly menacing and weird as weepy villain Le Chiffre. Judi Dench is back and crisp as ever in the role of M.
The story kicks off, appropriately, with an intensely physical chase through a construction site in Madagascar featuring Sebastien Foucan, co-creator of the free-running sport Parkour. From high-rises on the rise in Africa, to a bomb at a U.S. airport, to an opulent castle town in the former Yugoslavia, Casino Royale is fixed firmly in the present day. That makes the classic Bond juxtapositions of bombs and machine guns with babes 'n' Martinis even more jarring and funny. Campbell and company let us find the humor in it ourselves, which makes it all the more fun. What began as an ingenious blend of postwar anxieties and pleasures is postmodern now, like the virtual backgrounds of fight scenes in The Matrix Reloaded. Today it's entertaining just for its sheer Bondness, and this installment delivers the escapist goods in spades. But although we still don't really care about Bond's love life (a -- gasp! -- falling-in-love sequence here goes on too long, one of the tightly drawn film's few flaws), there's much less a sense of looking at the action from the outside. Right. This is a true thriller with an authentic movie hero.