Casino Royale strips down the James Bond character to the pure man, gone are the toys and gadgets which have typified James Bond movies of recent times (loved the first chase which involved Bond running after a bomb maker, played by Sébastien Foucan the founder of the urban free-style running known as Parkour) and instead we are left with the raw, intense, rough, arrogant and somewhat broody Bond who has to rely purely on instinct and himself in his pursuit of the bad guys. This is the Bond who has just earned his 00 stripes and is yet unsure of his place in the world of espionage. This too was the Bond who had his heart-broken.

The story is relatively straight forward. Someone is funding several major terrorist groups and its up to Bond to find out who and bring them down. The financier turns out to be Le Chiffre, a poker genius, who gambles once too often on the stock market and finds himself needing to win $10 million in a high stakes poker game to recover all of the lost terrorist money. Enter Bond and eventual love interest Vesper Lynd (played by a not at all sexy Eva Green) minder of “Bond’s” (actually Great Britain’s) stake in the poker game.

The story is only there to give us something against which to measure the growing of Bond. The movie is much more personal than ever before with Bond displaying moments of weaknesses, soul-searching and vulnerability that you don’t really get in any other movie in the Bond stable.

Daniel Craig as James Bond was the surprise in the film because I was all set to dislike him but he turned out to be pretty decent in his role. He gave Bond a much harder and tougher edge than seen previously and although I couldn’t help but laugh everytime he sprang out of the water you do have to give him props for his extremely fit body.

Overall, it wasn’t a bad movie though I can’t quite bring myself to rave over it like many of the critics who seemed to have fallen in love with it. There was some element missing though I can’t think what. Perhaps it was that at nearly two and a half hours it was just about half an hour too long.