Casino Royale -- 2006 -- PG-13

I finally saw it. You'd think being the Bond fan I am that I would have seenit a lot earlier than this, but I guess it took a little while. Anyway, I enjoyed it. It was different. So different, in fact, that my wife said it wasn't really a Bond film.

Casino Royale was the very first Bond novel by creator Ian Fleming and the only one that Albert Broccoli did not acquire the rights to in the beginning. Having finally gotten the rights to the novel, the producers opted to go with a "Bond Begins" idea and revolve the movie around the Casino novel being Bond's first big assignment as a "double-oh" agent. Being the 21st film in the series, this may cause a bit of confusion, especially since Judy Dench is still playing M. So instead of the suave super-agent we're used to, Bond is a more reckless, egotistical rogue who lets his feelings get in the way of the assignment.

A big change to the Bond format is primarily because this is an adaptation of the Casino Royale novel, a book that does not follow the traditional Bond movie structure. In other words, once we dispatch the bad guy and Bond gets the girl, the movie isn't over. In fact, it continues for another 25 minutes for something else to happen to further mix things up. This lack of traditional structure makes for an equally refreshing yet frustrating change. Devotees of the film structure will not like this at all, but having read most of the novels and seen all of the films, I was ok with this.

In the beginning, I was a bit concerned when we were jumping from one tableau to another without anything to connect them together, but my fears were abated when a clear line was drawn from one event to the next to show how everything ties neatly together. These tableaus were very action packed, and I mean they really pulled out the stops on our man Bond. In a lot of the situations presented, this film was a lot more brutal than the previous ones, which actually is more Fleming than anything else, since Ian Fleming tortured Bond considerably more in the books than the filmmakers ever did on screen.

To touch on the basic plot, there's a guy named LeChiffre who is a big time accountant and controls the money of terrorist organizations investing it and hoping to get a big return. When a deal goes sour, he finds himself in a bit of a pickle, so he decides to setup a high stakes poker game at Casino Royale with a $10 million buy-in in the hopes of raising $150 million for himself to pay back the money he lost in the sour deal. The authorities, including MI-6, know about this game and they want him to lose everything since that will leave both LeChiffre and his backers out in the cold. The movie follows the basic plot of the book fairly closely once it hits that point in the film, so if you've read the book, you'll have a basic idea of what will happen in the film. Now, there were still considerable changes, but they were mostly for visual impact. The book ending, for example, would be horrible to watch on screen, whereas the same situation played out the way they did it worked very well.

I am a sucker for these films, and though this one was not a traditional Bond film, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was arefreshing change to the Bond franchise, but with this being the final Fleming novel not adapted into a film, they'll either have to adapt the actual novels, or go back to the original stories they've been doing since License to Kill. Either way, I can't wait for 22.