Mediocre, and in no way a bond movie - Casino Royale Reviews

Ok, first off, I'm a big James Bond fan. I've read all the books, seen all the movies, so I was looking forward to seeing this opening night. The first thing that smacks the Bond fans in the face, is that the filmmakers have completely butchered the series timeline. We are introduced to Bond in this movie, as he was when he was just granted "00" status. So that puts us, where, the late '60s? Cool, well, not so cool, this movie is set in 2006. Bummer. Ok, I can accept that I guess, but wait, there is more. M is still the Judi Dench character who took over from the former M, but this is before... oh hell, ok, so there is no attempt at all to preserve the Bond movie timeline. They also did away with many of the Bond series staples. There are no gadgets, there is no "Q", and there is no Moneypenny. Ok, so this movie is clearly not a "James Bond" movie in the classic sense. But is it good as an action film? Is it entertaining? Hmm, not so much. In all other Bond films, and most films in this genre, you expect the "badguy" to present some form of danger to the populous in general. You know, a nuclear bomb, poison gas, inciting a war, something like that. In this movie we get... a stock broker, trying to defraud the market out of a few hundred million which he would presumably just pocket and then go live out his life on a desert island somewhere. So why would the Secret Service even care about something like this? Good question, no clue. There really is never any sense of danger, or urgency, or even anything interesting going on in this film. It just kind of meanders around, flashes a bunch of product placements in our face, and then abruptly ends without really any resolution. Even given these constraints the plot is terribly uninspired. James Bond seems to only have one trick up his sleeve to solve mysteries. He kills someone, takes their cell phone, and checks the history of whom they have called recently. That's it. So in summary: the plot is terrible. This is in no way continues the Bond legacy in terms of story or timeline, and the whole movie is just extremely uninspired.