By Steve Biodrowski

Whether or not this is the Bond film the world was waiting for, it definitely is the film that Bond fans were waiting for: a tense, gripping thriller mercifully free of the baggage of the previous Bond flicks, CASINO ROYALE takes the essentials of Ian Fleming's novel and updates them for the 21st century, seamlessly adding the requisite big screen action set pieces in the process.

The lame one-liners and jokey tone have been jettisoned, freeing the film from the moribund formula and allowing it to stand on its own, not as the umpteenth entry in a franchise. Or, to put it bluntly, this time out the filmmakers tried to make a good film, not just a fun 007 outing, with credibilty laced throughout the characters and the storyline.

And they had the nerve to do it without falling back on the crutches that held them up before and compromised previous attempts at making a more mature Bond. This is the movie they should have made when they brought Timothy Dalton on board, but Daniel Craig fills the tuxedo very nicely; in fact, he is damn near perfect, capturing the grim, lethal quality of Fleming's literary creation. He's a younger, untried Bond, finding his way in his new 00-status, and he makes you believe in the character as a human being, not a walking icon.

The result may not be for everyone's taste. The script retains the nasty torture sequence, with Bond strapped naked to a chair with the seat cut out, so that the villain Le Chiffre (a wonderfully convincing Mads Mikkelsen, leaping to the top of Bond's best adversaries) can whack his testicles repeatedly with a heavy, knotted rope. There's a fairly grim denounment, somewhat akin to ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE. And Bond learns to deliver his trademark quips and his famous self-introduction "Bond - James Bond") toward the end.

Beyond that, the film is not perfect. Some of the editing seems jumbled. At one point, Bond cleans up in his hotel room's lavatory after a nearly fatal poisoning, goes to play poker downstair, then returns to the hotel room to find his female partner Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) slumped in the shower, fully clothed and freaked out from all the action. Has she been there for hours while he was playing? And why didn't he notice her when he was in the bathroom before?

Also, there's at least one dangling thread: several times, the camera emphasizes a breath inhaler used by Le Chiffre, and at one point Bond inserts a tiny metal a tracking unit inside it. The "pay-off" is that Bond can track Le Chifree's movements. But Bond already knows Le Chiffre is in the Casino Royale hotel, playing a high-stakes poker game to retrieve money he lost, and we have no idea why 007 would want or need to follow him back to his hotel room. The whole episode seems a contrived way to get Bond nearby when some unsavory characters show up and demand the Le Chiffre return the money he lost, leading to a fight scene apparently intended to liven up the middle section of the film, which consists mostly of the poker showdown between Bond and Le Chiffre.

That said, the movie works almost from start to finish. There have been some critical complaints about the extended coda, but to a discerning viewer this section of the film is handled quite well, the too idyllic tone of the scenes perfectly inducing a sense of anticipation that something awful was going to happen.

The clever screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Paul Haggis serves up the usual elements but mixes them into a brand new dry martini, shaken - not stirred - to near perfection. Not only is Bond carefully characterized (an arrogant, cold-hearted man whose mistakes cost him dearly); there is also some really sparkling dialogue for his leading ladies (especially Vesper Lynd), who emerge more as human beings than boy-toy fantasy figures. (Think of Tracy Bond in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE.)

Director Martin Campbell handles the action with gritty expertise, beginning with a nifty, low-kye prologue in black-and-white that resembles a French noir thriller (imagine if John Pierre Melville had directed a Bond film) before shifting into a colorful, high-octane thriller. The truly amazing thing is that, under Campbell's direction, CASINO ROYALE provides the requisite over-the-top action without ever losing credibility as a tense, believable thriller. This is no frothy summer flick; it's lean and mean, even when charactes are leaping through the air and scaling buildings like something out of a Hong Kong fantasy film.

The film ends on a clever note, with 007 finally making his trademark declaration of self, "I'm Bond - James Bond," and the famous Monty Norman theme music blaring out, in its full glory, for the first time during the closing credits. Thus the movie neatly announces itself as a rebirth that will launch a new, invigorated franchise. Now that the character has undergone his "trial by fire" and proved himself in the line of duty, it will will be hard to sustain the dramatic intensity in future installments. But we are eager to see the filmmakers try.

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