Warning: The following contains significant spoilers.

The Standard calls me up from time to time, and asks me to write apparently spontaneous missives for their letters page. It’s not as simple as it sounds, as they are usually after a particular slant, and so the letter gets passed backwards and forwards between me and them for a couple of days until we reach a compromise that’s at least half way between what they want to print and what I want to say.

They emailed a couple of weeks ago to see if I’d write something about James Bond, but I was on deadline and so this time around I turned them down. I’m glad I did. Having now seen Casino Royale, I think whatever I wrote would have come across as naive and ill-informed.

This film is very, very different to anything that’s gone before it. It’s brutal, gritty, and far less comfortable than anything Brosnan, Connery or the Bonds in between ever managed. This is the first Bond who could feel real pain, the first one who would kill in cold blood (in The Man With the Golden Gun, Bond actually explains that when he kills it is only on the specific instructions of his government, but that’s all changed with Casino Royale), and the first Bond who has had no Q to arm him, and no Moneypenny to have swoon at his feet.

If he wasn’t called Bond, and if Judy Dench was playing a character with any name other than M, you’d not even put it in the same series as Moonraker or Goldeneye and, as a life-long fan, I’m not ashamed to say it benefits enormously from such a drastic change; a change that’s clearly signalled from the very first frame, as the producers have even dispensed with the trademark gun-barrel view of him walking across the screen, and the pico-clad girls in the credits.

I’ve gone back and dug out my review of the book, and re-reading it, I’m surprised to see how much of it could apply to the film, although I was very wrong on the ‘long and rather dull’ front:

Since they announced Casino Royale would be the next Bond film, I decided I ought to read it. The films and books usually don’t correlate all that closely, but I was interested to see what might be in store on the offchance they really do keep to their word and take it back to traditional Bond.

Hmmm…

Well, it could be a long and rather dull film if they do. You see, not much happens. I’m going to spoil the story here - the story of the book, at least, although in all likelihood not the story of the film.

Our hero finds himself in Royale, a small French town famed for its casino (you can guess its name). He has been sent there by M to play the mother of all Baccara matches against Le Chiffre, a Russian spy who is being hunted down by SMERSH, the Soviet Agency that knocks off the Union’s own rogue agents before they become an embarassement. It was alluded to in the film version of The Living Daylights, the plot of which revolved around the supposed revival of Smyert Shpionam (translation: death to spies, and the derivative of the contraction SMERSH).

You can pretty much guess who wins and what eventually happens to Le Chiffre, and to be honest the whole casino gambling stuff is so well written that reading about a bunch of people sitting around playing cards turns out to be quite exciting. Bond, though, is more or less unrecognisable as the character we see in the films.

There is a long, dwindling, slow wind-down of the storyline after the plot climax, in which Bond comes across as a desperate, love-sick teenager. In fact, no - more like a sad old man who is so desperate to cling to the woman who he might possibly, perhaps get further with that he will put up with pretty much anything. This isn’t the hump-em and dump-em love-villain we know from the films. He is a flawed, insecure character who seems suddenly to fear being left on his own.

Perhaps it was done to establish the character. This is the first book of the series, after all, and the dwindling ending does go on to explain why he lives his life the way he does, and why he is so driven from here on in (before this book, he had only killed two men, and he doesn’t kill anyone - even Le Chiffre - in these 189 pages). If that’s the case, then I can excuse it but, well, as I say, hmmm…

This new Bond may look nothing like the Bond of Fleming’s novels, but Daniel Craig has got the character down to a T. He plays a flawed spy with real weaknesses, and seemingly the only departure the producers have allowed is in permitting their spy to kill and kill and kill again. The first kill of his career, which we watch even before the credits roll is particularly messy and distressing, as he half strangles a man and then drowns what remains of his battered body in a sink in a public toilet.

The Russians are conveniently dropped from the film plot (although that hasn’t stopped some paranoia-focused news sites I’ve been reading from wondering aloud whether the killing of a Russian spy in London this week was an elaborate and rather sick publicity stunt), and France doesn’t get a look in. Instead, we are transported to an anonymous central African state, then Madagascar, Montenegro and, finally, Venice, for a conveniently tacked on climax that leads us directly into the next film.

Where they’ve not flinched, though, is in recreating the torture scene in which Bond is stripped naked, tied to a chair that’s missing its seat and then battered again and again between the legs with a fat knot at the end of a thick, heavy rope (although in the book Le Chiffre uses a carpet beater in this scene).

The only disappointment, I though, was how they’d handled Vesper’s treachery. You’d be hard-pressed to guess she was a double agent in the book, but the Albanian love knot she wears in the film is such an obvious warning that Bond deserves to have his 00 status revoked for missing it. He’d clearly forgotten M’s briefing.

Even so, this shoots straight in at the top of my Bond list, and Daniel Craig is, without question, a better Bond even than Connery. I suspect that the only reason no reviewers have yet said the same is that they know if they put it in print they’ll unleash a flood of complaints.

I must re-watch the original Casino Royale now. I did plough through half of it on DVD a couple of years ago, but it was so terrible I switched it off before the end. Looking through the cast list, though, it could make for some amusing star-spotting:

Derek Nimmo, Ronnie Corbett, Bernard Cribbins, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Barbara Bouchet, Bury Kwouk, Peter O’Toole, John Le Mesurier, Stirling Moss (as himself), Dave Prowse… how could a cast like that produce something so terribly unwatchable?

The moral: if you want to watch Casino Royale this weekend, make sure you pick the right one.

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