Bond Begins?

Casino Royal, to be released in November this year is the 21st Bond film and (despite all of the stupid website out there against the new actor) it looks like it really will be a "coming of age" film.

Bond, who for the first time will be played by a blonde actor (I don't know why that's an issue for some people - Bond was never a genius to begin with), goes back to the start of Ian Fleming's series, carrying out his initial two assassinations and earning his license to kill.

There will be no "Q" (so less gadgetry and more action) or Moneypenny (so no more lame double-entendres) and presumably "M" will be a man again (although Judi Dench was pretty decent...most of the time). Director Martin Campbell told reporters that Bond will makes mistakes and screw ups, finds violence hard to take, he won't admit it. He has to do two killings, (one is very messy) and he falls in genuinely love with a girl.

But Bond, is not always nice. "He's a hard guy, that's the difference I think," said special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, "There will be plenty of action."

One chase scene filmed in the Bahamas see Bond trying to run down terrorist Mollaka in a bulldozer, and then follows him on foot through a construction site, jumping from a 140-foot crane to a 120-foot crane. Mollaka is played by Sebastien Foucan, French co-founder of a popular urban sports trend called FreeRunning (also known as UrbanRunning or Parkour) and his powerful running style should make Bond appear clumsy or as Craig says, "Sort of fallible." The UrbanRunning scene along will be worth seeing and bringing it evenmore into the limelight.

"Casino Royale" will be a return to the roots, said co-producer Barbara Broccoli. That was one reason why EON dumped Pierce Brosnan, the most successful of the five Bond actors to date, and is taking a gamble with a new, younger face. "If you don't grow and change you die and we felt this was the right time and the right story to tell, and Daniel was the right guy to do it."

Although I liked the idea of Brosnan as Bond, that was back when Dalton was chosen, the series has gotten even more cheesy and unbelievable - it's meant to be a action flick not science-fiction! He would have been better in License to Kill & The Living Daylights, a better looking guy and a lot more suave, by the time he was brought in, the writing style had changed and he was old.

For me there's a parallell with the Batman movie series (athough that is a much younger franchise). It too started off well with Michael Keaton, and was carried on pretty well with Val Kilmer (who's in 9 films to be released this year!), but later ran into dire trouble when George Clueless came along with Brokeback Batman or Batman & Robin as they called it in theaters - why hasn't been a parody on that yet?...It's an easy target that would require little work.

What we need is something somewhere between Matt Damon's "Bourne" and Bale's interpretation in "Batman Beyond". I'm hopeful that Craig will give to Bond what Christian Bale brought to Batman: a sense of realism for a larger than life character. Bale brought Batman out of the realm of the super-fantasy and back into the realm more similar to our real world, which is where Craig has to bring Bond back to.