Casino Royale Reviews
Top Critic
Casino Royale has the answers to all my complaints about the 45-year-old James Bond series, and some I hadn't even thought of.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
I hope Craig finds more moments like that in Bond. And I hope he gets to wear that tuxedo again and again and again.
I consider Daniel Craig to be the most effective and appealing of the six actors who have played 007, and that includes even Sean Connery.
Craig is also the best Bond in the franchise's history.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/6
Daniel Craig is a fair-haired, bare-knuckle antidote to Pierce Brosnan. On the action-adventure level, it hits the bulls-eye.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
This, at last, is Bond stripped bare.
There's clearly life in the old dog yet.
Welcome to the new world of MI6's most storied agent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's The Spy Who Came In From the Warmth.
[Craig's] portrayal feels grittier and more complex than previous 007s. This is also partly the result of a better script, by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Oscar winner Paul Haggis, as well as top-notch directing by Martin Campbell.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Gone or reshaped are most of the conceits that have made Bond movies seem like an exercise in parody and nostalgia.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It's not as bad as Die Another Day, and not up to the jolly mayhem of the best films in the series.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Casino Royale isn't perfect, but it's surprisingly entertaining, even exciting for long stretches, and Craig manages to find new dimensions to a character that had long ago become a tired caricature. Everything old is new again, indeed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
What, no jet packs? No world-conquering supervillains orbiting the planet? No preference for shaken martinis?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
If the goal was to give Bond vivid new life, Casino Royale must be called a success. This Bond is not only licensed to kill but eager to get on with the job.
| Original Score: B+
You don't need a weatherman to tell you the 21st installment in the franchise brings an invigorating chill to the air.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Let the purists squawk: In Daniel Craig, the Bond franchise has finally found a 007 whose cruel charisma rivals that of Sean Connery.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
... the Bond franchise has always been fortunate in its choice of leading men, and Craig is one of their wisest picks yet.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Martin Campbell (who also directed Pierce Brosnan's first outing as Bond in Goldeneye), has chosen to give us a Bond who's both metaphorically and literally stripped bare. Let me take this opportunity to thank him for both.
The latest James Bond vehicle finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker.
| Original Score: 4/5
Half an hour too long and with too many villains we really can't place in the plot, Casino Royale nevertheless proves you seldom go wrong if you make a movie that leaves you stirred, not shaken.
Casino Royale unveils Daniel Craig as the new James Bond and, excepting Sean Connery, he's the best.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
The movie also travels the dark path of the book, which I won't detail here, but just know that Bond has to suffer for his art.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Casino Royale takes a huge gamble that moviegoers are ready for a fresh take on James Bond. And it wins the bet.
| Original Score: 3/4
You who carped that the 007 films had devolved into a catalog of fresh gadgets and stale puns, eat crow. You who said that the Austin Powers superspy spoofs made James Bond irrelevant, behave.
The tone isn't as cute or vapid as most installments; it's actually a little sinister compared with any recent Bond.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Casino Royale tries to have it both ways, moving toward the genuine while still grasping for the outlandish. The result is a film that's caught between caution and abandonment. And that's probably not a place where James Bond wants to be.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Meet the new Bond, not the same as the old Bond -- and thank God for that.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Now I'm glad they didn't euthanize James Bond, because Casino Royale is the best movie of the series in almost 40 years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Back to basics, is the idea.
| Original Score: 3/4
Fans of anyone other than Sean Connery who has played James Bond may want to look away, because admirers of Ian Fleming's 007 novels are almost bound to agree that Daniel Craig is the best Bond since Sean.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The striking thing about Craig's performance is that he seems to have been able to tune out over 40 years of screen history and approach Bond as just another role.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Back are the virtues of the original Ian Fleming novels, seen only fleetingly in previous films.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
If this franchise is indeed being reinvented (and it needed to be), it's going to be very interesting to see how Craig continues shaking and stirring his character's icy cocktail of baleful cruelty and suave assurance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
This exceedingly clever reincarnation, reclamation and reinvigoration of a franchise that has had its ups and downs stands taller than ever.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Die-hard fans may miss Q and Miss Moneypenny or the boys-and-their-toys gadgets or even the smirky tone. But in their stead is a riveting picture that, for all its globetrotting glamour and eyepopping action, demands we take this new Bond seriously.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
The script updates Ian Fleming's first Bond novel to a post-9/11 world and scales back the silliness that always seems to creep into the series.
[Casino Royale] not only simultaneously acknowledges and confounds audience expectations, but also neatly confirms that Daniel Craig's intriguing and charismatic tyro agent is cut from quite different cloth to his Savile Row-tailored predecessors.
In Casino Royale, Bond is still learning to tame his impulses into a style, and he's all the more dangerous because of it.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
A renewed sense of engagement informs director Martin Campbell's tough, absorbing adaptation of the 1953 Ian Fleming novel, the one that started the whole 007 business.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Casino Royale is everything you could ask for in a Bond movie, and more. Much more. Sometimes even more than is a good idea.
| Original Score: 3/4
To say Casino Royale ranks among the best Bond offerings is not intended as backhanded praise.
This is a Bond with great body but no soul.
There's one whopper of a reason why Casino Royale is the hippest, highest-octane Bond film in ages, and his name is Daniel Craig.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Taking the world's greatest spy back to his roots as a raw, impressionable brute whose cockiness at times fails him and who can lose his heart to a woman was a keen stroke of intelligence.
Casino Royale, though half an hour too long, is the first semi-serious stab at Fleming, and at the treacherous terrain that he marked out, since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, in 1969.
A Bond reboot that explores the fascinating early career of 007.
Casino Royale sees Bond himself recharged with fresh toughness and arrogance, along with balancing hints of sadism and humanity, just as the fabled series is reinvigorated by going back to basics.
