Word: casino
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...overseas readers will recall - they'd better, if the plot and emotions of this film are to make any sense - that the 2006 Casino Royale was a conscious return to the young agent on his first big case as an operative of Her Majesty's Secret Service. While dispatching the usual number of foreign villains, he falls for the lustrous Vesper Lynd (as in West Berlin; Fleming was addicted to pun names for his Bond girls), an agent for the British Treasury Service. A misunderstanding about Vesper's motives leads to her death, for which Bond blames himself. Quantum...
...Bond films carry such baggage and have been imitated so many times that during any scene there'll be another playing in your head: one from some other movie that scriptwriters Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (all of whom worked on Casino Royale) are either citing or borrowing from. Bond films, for a start. Q's gone missing, but M's there, and the sympathetic CIA agent Felix Leiter, making his ninth appearance in the series (played here, as in Casino, by Jeffrey Wright). And a rooftop chase that's the stunted little brother of the terrific parkour...
...From the first moment of Casino Royale, Craig was a different sort of Bond. Instead of the 007 of the Fleming canon - a tough but smooth gentleman spy, schooled at Eton and Cambridge, radiating wit and warm sensuality - Craig seems a cyber- or cipher-Bond, with a loyalty chip implanted in a mechanism that's built for murderous ingenuity. ("If you could avoid killing every possible lead," M tells him in this installment, "it would be deeply appreciated.") In lieu of the double-entendre bons mots assigned to Connery, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan, Craig communicates in grunts and sullen...
...Appealingly sturdy in Casino, Craig is near-mute here. This Bond is a crippled titan, "blinded by inconsolable rage," as M gently puts it; he shows as much emotion as a crash-test dummy and endures nearly as much damage. But since MI6 currently has more turncoat agents than a Whack-a-Mole game, and Bond is the functioning spy M can trust, he's obliged to save the world on his own, while other branches of the government want him captured or killed...
...movie suffers from the absence, even in flashbacks, of seraphic-satanic Eva Green, who played Vesper in Casino. But Kurylenko, a lovely Russian-Ukrainian hybrid who is oddly duskied up to look vaguely Latina, is a whiz at raising Quantum's temperature and gradually luring Bond out of his stolid shell. It's a pleasure to watch this model-turned-actress, also seen briefly illuminating Max Payne, turn into a model actress. Here's one Bond girl who's a richly appealing woman, with or without Bond...