Casino Royale

The last time the proprietors of the James Bond franchise rebooted the series, they did it with Pierce Brosnan. Part of why people who hated James Bond before loved Pierce Brosnan was his effortless cool. He looked like he rolled out of bed every morning in a tux with his martini in one hand, a gun in the other and a beautiful woman sleeping there next to him. That bored me to tears, and it didn't help that Brosnan Bond movies grew progressively worse around him.

Bond gets another reboot with "Casino Royale" and I couldn't be happier. Daniel Craig's 007 sweats, bruises easily and gets covered with cuts and scratches. He finds himself out of breath if he runs for too long and after prolonged fighting, his muscles show strain and his veins pop on his forehead. He's arrogant, cold-blooded and understands that taking a life or sleeping with a vixen are choices, and he copes with the repercussions. Brosnan was a well-oiled machine, but Craig is a human being, a man with a job that's both desirable and also dangerous as hell.

Craig is perfect casting for "Casino Royale," which is an origin story that begins -- in a noir-fueled black-and-white sequence -- with the second kill that cements James Bond's 00-status. Before the film is over, Craig has killed many men, but unlike the Brosnan Bonds in which people seemed to blow up in droves, every life this Bond takes matters. His mission involves banker-to-terrorists Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), an enigmatic and brilliant snake with ties to even worse men. Accompanied by treasury official Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), Bond is entered into a poker game where the stakes may be higher than a $10 million buy-in.

It was a bit of a leap of faith for the producers to turn Bond over to the ultra-intense Craig, who gives what is almost certainly the most psychologically complex lead performance in the franchise's history. But they weren't ready to make "Casino Royale" into a through-and-through character piece, which may be why Oscar-winner Paul Haggis was brought in to enrich the film's quieter moments, but everything else was entrusted to tried-and-true veterans in director Martin Campbell ("Goldeneye") and scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade ("Die Another Day"). That's why even though Ian Fleming's novel is a lean tome with a minimum of explosions and action set pieces, the film is a bloated 144 minutes with at least three or four fights, chases and conflicts that feel like the cut-and-paste jobs that they are.