Daniel Craig, to answer your first question, makes a fine James Bond; I’d have preferred Clive Owen but apparently he didn’t want to take the role. I think the producers made a smart move by remaking this as the Bond origin story, more or less, since the original got taken in a strange (though funny) direction and was ripe.

What I think is perhaps less successful about this Casino Royale is the nearly complete humorectomy. Part of this series’ charm has been the implicit acknowledgment that its just a bit beyond believable by including a touch of camp, such as the circus scene in Octopussy and the Sheriff J.W. Pepper character in both Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun. I think the idea is to update the series in the same manner as SciFi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica but, well, idea is not execution.

Otherwise, except for the ending, I’m pretty happy with the film. Some good action sequences, including an amazing opening sequence where Bond chases Sebastien Foucan on foot through high rise construction sites and an embassy in an African capital, confronting the bad guy over a casino table where our hero also meets the CIA’s Felix Leiter for the first time and heartbreak over a woman taking me back to my favorite 007 flick, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Good but not great. Craig and producer Barbara Broccoli have given strong hints that Bond 22, coming Nov. 8, 2008, will be an original script as well as a sequel to this one, where Bond will seek revenge against those behind the tragedy here, and so perhaps the new tenor will be better handled the second time around. The same writing team, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, are doing the script and since the also co-wrote another of my favorites, Die Another Day, so I’m betting on better.

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