best Bond ever

I know I’m late to this party, but I loved Casino Royale. Daniel Craig and the filmmakers grok Ian Fleming’s protagonist, who is “ironical, brutal and cold,” as the NYT’s Manohla Dargis reminds us:

Every generation gets the Bond it deserves if not necessarily desires, and with his creased face and uneasy smile, Mr. Craig fits these grim times well. … “Casino Royale” opens with a black-and-white sequence that finds the spy making his first government-sanctioned kills. The inky blood soon gives way to full-blown color, but not until Bond has killed one man with his hands after a violent struggle and fatally shot a second.

“Made you feel it, did he?” someone asks Bond of his first victim. Bond doesn’t answer. From the way the director, Martin Campbell, stages the action though, it’s clear that he wants to make sure we do feel it.

After twenty-five years of the debonair, ironical side of Bond, the cold and brutal side is back.

Mr. Craig’s Bond looks as if he has renewed his license to kill.

Dargis remarks on this, but she is dismissive of the movie’s “shenanigans”—it’s 007, a mere entertainment for the masses, after all. She takes for granted—or perhaps doesn’t want to take into account—something that Daniel Craig’s Bond does not, and it’s what accounts for his nuanced portrait: that he is licensed to kill really bad guys (not cartoon villains) for a morally superior cause (queen and country). Craig’s Bond couldn’t care less if his martinis are shaken or stirred, but he’s not confused about which side he’s on. And neither is the audience.

How utterly refreshing.

Curiously, while Dargis acknowledges a “core seriousness” to the film, she ascribes this merely to the filmmakers’ desire to make pots of money by setting up a financially successful franchise. She nods to the care that went into the project—the usual extravagant pyrotechnics just won’t do the trick, she implies, because audiences are too sophisticated after having seen one too many Bond movies—but she fails to take it that crucial step further and acknowledge the real source of audience gratification.

Daniel Craig’s Bond is the brute whose presence we would rather not think about but whose existence somewhere on the periphery of our consciousness comforts us. He embodies the dictum attributed (falsely but plausibly) to George Orwell:

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Ms. Dargis seems to find this notion—and its personification in a James Bond for the 21st century—distasteful. Me? I’m grateful to those rough men.