James Bond Has Returned

Gosh, it's been a while hasn't it? So, what's moved me to take up my blogging keyboard? None other than Bond, James Bond, 007, Licenced to Kill. To be even more precise, everyone's favourite spy's return in Casino Royale.

Adopting slightly out-of-date jargon as is the fashion in film PR, Eon Productions announced some months ago that they saw Casino Royale - the first of Ian Fleming's Bond novels and the only one they had not filmed - as a chance to "reboot" the Bond franchise. Despite the untimeliness of the phraseology, the idea was a good one and the goal has been triumphantly achieved.

In Casino Royale, Bond has been dragged away from the gadget-drenched clothes-horse he always seems to resemble by the end of each Bond actor's lease on the part and taken back to the brutish - but undoubtedly magnetic - killer that Fleming originally created. Gone are the invisible Astons and remote-controlled BMWs, back is the silenced Walther PPK and the easy ruthlessness. As someone who abhors violence, I should - of course - object to this, but the secret of Bond has always been the way his veneer of sophistication, the bow tie and beluga, somehow grants one permission to enjoy the thuggery underneath.

The combination of toughness and suaveness that Bond defines and that defines Bond has, until now, only been truly epitomised by Sean Connery: Moore was too much dandy and too little deadly, Dalton saturnine enough but lacking in savoir-faire, Lazenby too Australian. Pierce Brosnan came extraordinarily close but his Bond was just that bit too ready with a quip and just that bit too slight of frame: a calculating killer-from-a-distance, rather than Fleming's "blunt instrument"; Brosnan's Bond was a Bond for the nineties - smooth and sleek. In Daniel Craig, however, Connery at last has a rival. For the first time in 30-odd years Bond is a government-appointed killer, a man who hits people hard and doesn't expect them to get up afterwards.

In this, the new Bond benefits from a better conversational style. Some critics have suggested an absence of humour but that simply shows how jaded modern critics have become. What there is is an absence of is bad puns (eg "I've always wanted Christmas in Turkey" to the ludicrously named Christmas Jones) and their replacement with some good ones (eg after losing badly to Vesper Lynd during a bout of verbal fencing, Vesper: "How was your lamb?", Bond (ruefully): "Skewered. It has my sympathies"). There is even a scene where Bond teases Vesper that she has been assigned the alias "Stephanie Broadchest" - a wonderful way to send up the Bond naming conventions, especially coming from the same writers who gave us "Xenia Onatop", who killed men by squeezing them between her thighs. There is a sense in which all those behind the new Bond are putting aside the most childish things in their toybox, rejecting teddy whilst still clinging on to Action Man.

If there is one thing that the new Bond for the noughties isn't, it is camp. He might, however, be gay. The Bond books have always had more than an element of repressed, public-school homoeroticism about them, and that certainly seems to have been in the minds of writers and director in the making of Casino Royale. For the first time since the instant before Ursula Andress emerged from the waters in Dr No, the body over which the camera lingers belongs to Bond rather than a female companion. And, it has to be said, it's a hell of a body. I'm sure I can't have been the only person in the cinema to turn round to see their partner's eyes widening as Craig emerges from the sea in his trunks and then vow that this time they really will do more exercise (though I'm not sure Ashtanga yoga will ever give me a bosom like the new model Bond's, to my regret and my other half's delight by far the largest on show in the whole movie). Throughout the movie, it is Bond's form that is fetishised - from the opening credits, as ludicrous as ever but shorn of their female silhouettes in favour of a stylised Bond, through to a naked Bond being strapped to a chair and beaten about the balls with a rope.

It is hugely to Daniel Craig's credit (and that of the writers) that he doesn't allow the musclebound looks to overshadow his character. It was with Brosnan's Bond (in particular in "The World Is Not Enough") that the writers first tried to give the character some depth, some room for doubt, here they go even further. Here there is an attempt, not overplayed, to give some explanation as to why Bond is such a bastard, as well as a hint at a better man underneath. The final minutes, in particular, do a far better job of showing a man capable of love and remorse being transformed into a heartless killer than the many, many, many hours of Star Wars I-III ever did for Darth Vader (perhaps because they were written by people who weren't stuck at an emotional age below 12).

From the chase scene after the credits, in which the man being chased demonstrates all the balletic skills of Le Parkour while Bond literally bulldozes through all in his path, Casino Royale knows exactly what it wants to do and does it. It's the best Bond in ages, better than Goldeneye, perhaps better than any Bond since Goldfinger. In fact, if David Arnold would learn to make proper use of the Dr No theme, I suspect it might well have been the best since "From Russia With Love". Go and see it.