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After releasing 20 movies featuring Agent 007 James Bond as the main character, someone finally decided to make a movie after the original Bond story. Casino Royale is based on British author Ian Fleming's first Bond book by the same name.
Daniel Craig debuted his performance as the debonair British agent with this film, succeeding Pierce Brosnan who had represented Bond in the last four movies. With a new James Bond, the filmmakers decided to go with a slightly altered formula for Casino Royale.

The movie opens with James Bond (Daniel Craig) earning his "00" status and then goes into the opening credits. Here is where the first difference between this movie and recent ones before it are revealed: there are no naked-women silhouettes in the entire opening-credits scene, despite my best efforts to find one.
Whereas Bond was essentially invincible in past movies, Daniel Craig's version seems to be able to bleed, both physically and emotionally. His pride gets the best of him, he gets beat up, poisoned, captured, and, worst of all, he becomes emotionally attached to a woman. The humanized Bond is refreshing, and makes this one of the most realistic (albeit still very unrealistic) 007 movies ever.
There are very few humorous "one-liners" that used to be so prominent to Bond, which does two things for this movie: it makes the mood more serious, but it steals that "cool factor" from Bond's personality. Craig gives a Bond who is almost human, but a Bond who isn't completely 007.
The story-line of Casino Royale is very muddy, and is definitely its biggest blunder. Basically, the writers wanted viewers to focus only on Bond, the Bond-girl Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), and a few other main characters and the way they interacted because of the actually storyline, which you are just supposed to feel confident that they understand without you actually grasping it yourself. While watching it you just have to learn to accept that some parts of the story are going to be poorly explained, leave your confusion behind, and focus on the local story between Bond and Lynd (for example, there really is no defined villain in the whole movie). There is a twist in the story, but again is only related to the local issue.
This leaves a gap that cannot just be filled by the interactions between Bond and Lynd. Perhaps the movie makers did this so that viewers would concentrate on how Bond grows and develops (which he actually does in this movie), but it doesn't change the fact that there is still a gap.
Casino Royale tries something new and refreshing with the Bond series, and succeeds relatively well, despite some flaws such as the muddy story. As a Bond movie it deserves an A-, but as a regular movie it earns a B-.

Learn more about this author, Troy Shields.
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