The film succeeds in redefining the character of James Bond for a new era and the franchise is all the better for it. Funding the operation is the British government itself, who sends its beautiful agent Vesper Lynd to tag along and make sure Bond doesn't blow their £10 million buy-in with no results.īond and Lynd strike up a romantic relationship - of course, this is a James Bond film after all - which will become very important as events unfold and it is revealed that Lynd has an agenda all her own. The idea is to bankrupt Le Chifre, putting him in trouble with the people he owes money to and shutting down his criminal operations. After racking up his requisite two kills to become a '00' Bond is sent on a mission to Montenegro to take on the international criminal Le Chifre in a poker game at the Casino Royale. In Casino Royale, Daniel Craig is a more rugged, realistic James Bond, the 'blunt instrument' that Ian Flemming first envisioned the character to be.

Instead they concentrated on the man himself, his character and his raw power. The producers eschewed the over-the-top CG special effects and science fiction-like gadgets that came to define the franchise, reaching new heights of absurdity in Die Another Day, which saw villains genetically altering their ethnicity and manipulating death rays from space. In stepped Daniel Craig, the first fair-haired Bond, who rose to the challenge gracefully and rather successfully. It wasn't that Pierce Brosnan was incapable of carrying the franchise, but he had been saddled with silly scripts and storylines that just kept getting more and more outlandish. In order for an origin story to make sense, the film-makers needed (another) new Bond.

Through a series of serendipitous events that began several years ago when Sony obtained Columbia Pictures and a share in MGM, the team was finally able to negotiate a deal that would bring them the rights to the story, bringing it to the screen with all the grandeur it deserved.

In order to do this, producers went back to Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale, a story that the 'official' Bond team had been wanting to gain the rights to for many years. This is the film that was meant to reboot the flagging James Bond franchise, exposing the origins of Bond's career as a '00' - a secret agent with a license to kill.

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