Tough guy.(Casino Royale)(Movie review)

THE first James Bond movie I saw was The Living Daylights, one of Timothy Dalton's two outings in the role, in which 007 foiled a nefarious arms dealer (is there any other kind?) and a rogue Russian general, helped rout the Soviets in Afghanistan, and romanced a beautiful cellist. The most memorable scene involved Bond and his lady friend using her case as a sled, riding it across the Swiss border to safety and shouting insouciantly: "Nothing to declare! Only a cello!" I was eight at the time, which is probably the perfect age to be introduced to a series that's always been a prepubescent boy's fantasy of what grown-up adventures are like--the gadgets and guns and the striking lack of gore, the National Geographic-meets-Tintin globetrotting, and the vision of sexual relations as little more than a series of really cool playdates.

Casino Royale, on the other hand, this autumn's attempt to kick-start the franchise by returning to its Ian Fleming roots, is meant to be something else entirely: Bond when he wasn't yet Bond, but just a handsome roughneck ill-at-ease in a tuxedo, by turns aggressive and vulnerable, capable of falling in love and even reconsidering his line of work. Bond for grown-ups, in other words--a man with a psychology and a history, a spy who sweats and bleeds and suffers, a hero who can't always save the damsel in distress.

This means stripping away most of the Bondian window dressing, the old familiars that have been associated with 007 since Sean Connery slipped into the tuxedo. This Bond's first car is a Ford (a rare product placement that amuses rather than appalls), not the expected Aston Martin; there's no Q and no gadgets; the stunts are unrealistic but not deliberately absurd. The villain is nefarious enough--a mournful swell named Le Chiffre (the Danish star Mads Mikkelsen), banker to the world's terrorists, who weeps blood from a damaged tear duct--but he's a smallish fish instead of a Goldfinger or a Blofeld, a middleman who spends half the movie trying to keep the sharks from swallowing him up. There's an actual actress--a smoldering Eva Green, rescued from the pretensions of Bertolucci's The Dreamers and the wreck of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven--playing the first of all the Bond girls, and she goes by Vesper Lynd, which is ludicrous but only mildly so compared to Xenia Onatopp, say, or Pussy Galore. And there's even gentle mockery of the absent 007 conventions: "Shaken or stirred?" a barman asks this Bond, and he fires back: "Do you think I give a damn?"

None of this should work. Bond isn't a once-serious icon gone to camp and boyish fantasy--he is a fantasy, and always has been, however seriously Ian Fleming may have taken him at first. The critics who draw distinctions between the silliness of the Roger Moore era and the supposedly grittier Connery and Pierce Brosnan ...