A new era dawns with the arrival of Daniel Craig as James Bond and any doubts can immediately be dispelled: Craig is easily the best Bond since Sean Connery. His 007 is three-dimensional, mysterious, charming, funny, vulnerable and tough as hell, and Martin Campbell's second outing as a Bond director (he introduced the world to Pierce Brosnan in 1995's GoldenEye) is a white-knuckle adventure which rarely lets up and at its height reaches the sort of cinematic peaks that have made this the most successful franchise in film history.
Although the film is set very much in the here and now - the impressive use of modern technology for once seems both accurate and believable - the film is based on Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, and shows us Bond earning his 00s in a brutal opening sequence. But he is clearly a maverick that MI6 are worried about, especially its head M (Judi Dench) who is perturbed to say the least when she returns home one night to find that Bond has broken into her apartment.
The two agree an uneasy peace when M dispatches Bond on his first mission: to bring down a suspect known as Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), a renegade banker who now works for the world's terrorists as a broker and organizer of large scale disasters. Believing Le Chiffre is planning to bring down several aircraft in order to profit on the stock market, Bond's journey takes him to Africa, the Bahamas, North America, Venice and a centrepiece poker game held at the Casino Royale in Montenegro.
A great Bond movie needs a great baddie and Le Chiffre is more than up to the mark: a ruthless killer, he is also an asthmatic, with a scar that crosses his eye and makes him cry tears of blood. Mikkelsen and Craig's scenes are full of real tension, whether they are politely facing each other across the card table or battling each other in a truly eye-watering (not to mention nude) torture sequence.
Equally impressive is the main Bond girl: French actress Eva Green as Vesper Lynd, an uptight accountant who is sent to monitor Bond as he spends vast amounts of taxpayers' money on poker. Their mutual disapproval inevitably turns to romance, and then love, and there is a real tenderness and believability about the scenes they share.
With some stunning action sequences to boot - including a Free Running chase that has to be seen to be believed - this has all the ingredients to breathe life into a series that was arguably becoming stale. But there are some quibbles - at 144 minutes it's the longest Bond film ever made (beating the incumbent On Her Majesty's Secret Service by four minutes), and as a result the tension tails off in the second half. The great action set-pieces - and they are great - all occur in the first half of the film.
