Best Bond

Forget the debate about whether Craig is the best Bond since Sean Connery. It’s irrelevant. Craig is the best Bond, full stop. So, he’s not quite what Ian Fleming had in mind but then neither was bleeding Moonraker. Casino Royale is simply the best Bond movie of all time.

Director Martin Campbell has stripped everything back to basics and making Bond a steely-eyed killer doing the country’s dirty work rather than a master of the double entendre weighed down with an invisible car. He’s got his wits, and a gun and a bad guy to bring down. That’s about it.

The bad guy is Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), banker to regimes everywhere. Le Chiffre owes millions to a client who won’t take no for an answer and must thus win a high stakes poker game. Bond – funded by Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), a Treasury official who just happens to be gorgeous and have breasts – is the player who can stop him.

While the poker tournament gives Campbell and Craig the chance to play around with the Bond conventions – the suit, the suave air, the vodka martini – this high stakes battle of wills is only a small part of this thrilling film. This is exciting, brutal and, with Craig’s Bond-as-flawed-human-being portrayal, the kick up the backside this franchise so badly needed.