Let me start off by saying that the first half of this film is a cheat, a good cheat but a cheat none the less. First we have the excellent PTS and Danny pulls it off in spades. The intro works so well because, like past Bonds being introduced in the series, he earns his cool moment by doing something clever. Here he assassinates a traitor of MI6 cooly and coldy and tops it off with one great, dry one liner. I'll skip along to were I feel the movie starts to cheat. After we get that very well crafted free running squence, Bond seems to track everyone down with a cell phone. Despite some good humor and clever dialogue, the film should have turned to a smart thriller but it didn't. Bond simply tracked all the operators of Project Elypsis via cell phones and ended it in what else ? A big, over blown action sequence. If I was the writer of the film what I would have done is this, make Bond fall into the scheme incidentally or make him notice something seemingly insignificant. Fleming loved to do that in his books, for example Goldfinger or Drax as a cheat at cards. Thunderball and stumbling upon's SPECTRE plot to hijack nuclear weapons by getting into a small fued with Count Lippe. After the first half, and this is first Bond film were this ever happened, things get signfigantly better.
We arrive in Motenegro and we get are first introduction of Vesper Lynd. Eva Green took the role and made it her own, she was the greatest Bond girl since Diana Rigg as Tracy Di Vicenzo in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE. Even better, the character has vastly improved from Fleming's verison. In the novel, Vesper was simply a women with a dark cloud over her but nothing about her was particularly memorable. Here, Vesper is the perfect companion for Craig's Bond, smart and hilarously sarcatic. Her conversation with Bond on the train is up there with the best dialogue in the series and also far more adult then past Bonds. Not Adult as in rauchy but Adult as in mature. No idiotic, immature, one liners written by thirteen year old boys that plagued the Brosnan era.
Now the heart of the film, the battle of wits between Bond and Le Chiffre. Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre, like Vesper, is an improvement of the literary incarnation. Le Chiffre was clearly a nastly little man in the novel but fairly unremarkable. Mads carried his character with athority and a very cold deameanor but was just enough human due to the situation he was in. What made the Bond/Le Chiffre rivarly so interesting is that for once in a Bond film, both sides are on the same playing feild. Le Chiffre is a deperate man, he lost the money of his terrorist cilents who are more then willing to kill him. Bond needs to take that money from Le Chiffre to hurt those terrorist clients. Two desperate men in a game of luck and there is no secound prize. The card game, a game of hi stakes poker for Le Chiffre to get he 100 mil he needs, itself was not exactly a revolution in film making but it was tense enough because Bond needed to read Le Chiffre and vice versa.
The end not only leaves us with the mystery of who exactly is this orginization but what will happen to Bond. In the later day early films, the death of Bond girls and death itself was inconsequential. Here it is established that Bond now lives in a wolrd of consequences. You can't shoot up an embassy without the politically back fire and you can't kill without causing a mess. That moment were Bond told Vesper to tell Mathis about the bodies in the hallway was the moment the innocence of death was lost in the series. Basically the opposite of Bond delivering the body of the imposter chauffeur and dimissing the whole thing in a one liner in DOCTOR NO. Bond, now a devistated man in a far more serious world, will have to question who he can trust if he chooses to do so. I can't wait to see what happens next.
