‘Casino Royale’ Turns 10, Part 1: Still The Greatest Bond Film Ever

The mid-2000s weren’t an easy time to be sanguine about the cinematic future of James Bond. We’d just finished the Pierce Brosnan years, an era characterized by Bond movies that were routinely outclassed by other spy flicks (True Lies, Mission: Impossible, Ronin); where Bond flicks had once set the standards for action filmmaking, the producers were now merely jumping on the fads that were already out there, like CGI and Denise Richards. (Brosnan himself was and is a great, charismatic actor —if you can watch The Thomas Crown Affair without grinning, you are made of stone— he just never fully channeled his charms into 007.) Die Another Day, the final Brosnan outing, took everything that hadn’t been working in the previous films and cranked it up to thirteen. By that point, even the Bond optimists —and I was one of them— had to admit that the franchise was on a precipice.

The earliest bits of intel about Casino Royale did little to allay my fears. Sure, it was exciting that we were finally going to see a real big-budget adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel (to which, long story short, the producers had finally acquired the rights), but that good news was severely undercut by the announcement that Casino Royale would serve as…wait for it…James Bond’s origin story.

I can’t begin to tell you how terrible this idea sounded at the time. For decades, the 007 films had walked a tightrope of cognitive dissonance, requiring fans to accept the notion that (a) Bond had remained roughly the same age over a four-decade span, and (b) that he was always the same guy, whether he was portrayed by a Scotsman, an Australian, or Remington Steele. To give the character an origin story — especially one that was set in 2006 — was to grab that tightrope and shake it.

But that was only half the problem; the other half was that James Bond had no goddamn origin story! It was part of his charm: the handsome stranger with an undefined past and an uncertain future. Rejiggering the entire machine to examine Bond’s roots felt like a craven cash-grab, a last-ditch attempt to modernize the series by making it fit in with all the superhero sagas and nostalgia-driven reboots that were beginning to flood the marketplace. As bad as Die Another Day had been, there was every chance that Casino Royale could be worse. Well, I was prepared for that. I’d endured plenty of stinkers with the 007 logo on them. I walked into the theater on opening night and crossed my fingers.

By the time I walked out, I was pretty sure that Casino Royale was one of the best. Ten years and countless viewings later, I’m positive that it’s the best.

To explain why, let’s start from the beginning. The pre-title sequence, to use the common Bond-fan parlance, has long been one of the most important and memorable parts of any 007 film. Sometimes it’s a self-contained mini-movie of its own with no connection to the main plot, as in Goldfinger or Octopussy; more often, it’s an audacious inciting incident that kicks off the rest of the story while showcasing an amazing stunt or two (like the union-jack parachute in The Spy Who Loved Me or the freefall-into-a-plane in GoldenEye).

Here’s Casino Royale‘s pre-title sequence: Bond shoots a couple of guys. That’s about it. No explosions, no skydiving, just a tense conversation and a bathroom brawl. And to top it all off, it’s shot in grainy black-and-white. It’s like the producers looked at all the previous 007 films and made a Costanza-esque decision to do the opposite. And yet the sequence works —beautifully— because it gives us real insight into the character. We’re not just seeing another chapter of Bond’s long history of derring-do; we’re seeing his first two assassinations as a secret agent, one of which is both physically and emotionally messy. (The shot of Bond forcing himself to calm down after he suffocates his first target in a sink is maybe the best, most quietly devastating moment in the entire film.)

That air of suave detachment for which Bond has always been famous takes on a new resonance, because we can now understand it as a reaction to something, not just a stock personality trait. Along the same lines, we get that great final shot of Bond turning to camera with his weapon drawn, which then morphs into the world-famous 007 gunbarrel logo, thus giving that decades-old trademark the emotional significance that it never had. The idea that Bond’s most iconic image is actually a commemoration of the first usage of his license to kill? Chillingly perfect.

Looking back on it now, though, what stands out to me about Casino Royale‘s opening isn’t how well it works; it’s how risky it was. Poking holes in 007’s heroic facade to introduce doubts and weaknesses into the character is precisely the kind of choice that has the potential to alienate more Bond fans than it pleases. (The only previous Bond film to tread seriously in this territory was On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which is beloved by hardcore Bond geeks like me but hated by almost everyone else, and holds the dubious distinction of being one of the lowest-grossing 007 films in history.) As for the gunbarrel logo — well, that’s only one of the most recognizable images in the entire history of popular culture; no danger in pissing anyone off by messing with that, right?

All this brinksmanship and we’re still only talking about the first few minutes of the movie! The remaining two hours of Casino Royale traffics in narrative material that’s equally perilous, if not moreso. Any one of the dozens of daring choices the film makes could easily have relegated it to the “what the hell were they thinking?” graveyard alongside Batman and Robin and the Matrix sequels. Instead, every one of those decisions pays off heroically, and Casino Royale emerges as an unqualified classic.

But I still think it might have killed the franchise. We’ll get to that later.

RELATED: ‘Casino Royale’ Turns 10, Part 2: The Parkour Scene Is The Film’s Mic-Drop Moment

[Where to stream Casino Royale (2006)]

Nick Rheinwald-Jones is a contributing writer for Previously.TV and hosts the podcast Making the Sausage, a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of making television.