I basically loved the movie, but the thing about wiring the money has me thinking.
Vesper could have wired that money to any account in the world. Why on earth would they withdraw the money (assuming that’s even necessary) at a nearby branch that Bond could just run over to?
Why not have someone withdraw it from the Athens branch, etc.?
That’s really “gimme a break” territory.
I was referring to the following exchange in the film.
James Bond: I always thought M was a randomly assigned initial, I didn’t know it stood for…
M: Utter one more syllable and I’ll be forced to kill you.
In other words, it seems that “M” stands for some name (or nickname) she’d rather keep private.
IIRC, in the books M.'s real name was Sir Miles Messervy.
Cool, GSV. Which book is it in?
I think it’s in The Man with the Golden Gun.
Thanks, I read them again a couple of months ago and can’t tell them apart. 
Mumsey?
I finally got to see the movie this last Sunday, and I was floored. I expected it to be good, but it wildly exceeded my expectations. This blog by a television writer I ran across sums up it up pretty well:
(I can’t quote the whole thing, of course, but it’s an interesting perspective if you have a second).
One thing that really appealed to me was the apparent influence of the Bourne movies on making the fight scenes appear more realistic. Bond in the books boxed and formed the first Judo class in a British public school, and whoever coordinated the fight scenes threw in some Judo for the martial arts geeks. In the flashback scene of Bond killing the guy at the beginning, as he’s dragging the guy to the sink to drown him, he’s grabbing hold of his shirt collar and choking him with a Judo gi strangle. Later, when he’s fighting the two guys in the casino stairwell, he chokes one of them to death with a hadaka jime/rear naked choke/mata leão on the ground, Brazilian style. It even shows a close up of his feet as he gets his hooks in. 
I tried to find out who the fight scene coordinator was, but no luck.
$120 million is a lot of money, to be sure, but the way everyone was acting about it brought to mind Dr. Evil trying to extort the U.S. for $1 MILLION dollars…mwahahahahaha. It just didn’t seem like an earth-shattering amount. Sure, I can see why the UK government doesn’t want it in the hands of terrorists, but I doubt the Crown is really all that hard up for the cash itself. Not really a plot hole, but the stakes just didn’t feel high enough to me. I guess that has to do with the “realism” of this Bond, because of course real bad guys don’t have secret volcano layers and doomsday devices at their immediate disposal (I hope).
Not a lot of money to the Crown relatively speaking, perhaps, but as you say it could do some serious damage in the hands of terrorists. A quick google of black market plutonium prices, for instance, turned this up:
http://www.lionessmedia.com/documentaries/terrortrade.htm
Not only that, but if he lost, I suppose MI6 is potentially guilty of treason.
From Bond’s reaction, it was not the money, but the fact that it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. M. was aware that something was not as it should be.
I murmured to myself, “Here you go, mate. Don’t spend it all in one place.” 
Well said. Exactly my reaction.
… and if I may add: I loved it. Well worth the wait, and Craig was maybe the best Bond since Connery (although I liked Dalton a lot more than most Dopers upthread, apparently).
The opening parkour chase scene was great. Opening credits with the playing-card theme were also great - I even liked the song (“You Know My Name” by Chris Cornell, not available on iTunes until Dec. 14, per Wikipedia). The fuel truck fight at the airport was also very exciting - seeing the plane’s exhaust fling the car in the air was amazing.
As to the gun in the desk… could Bond have scouted out the office earlier, found out what kind of gun the crooked agent had, and replaced its magazine with one holding duds of the same weight as real bullets? Just a thought.
Good chemistry between Bond and Lynd. Their first conversation, on the train, was delightful. Her later betrayal really surprised me.
Favorite line, out of many good ones: Felix Leiter, “Do we look like we need the money?”
Bring back Q!!! Not John Cleese as R, but a new Q. There just needs to be a gadget guy (or gal?), even though I applaud “Casino Royale” for not being as gadget-centric as the other recent Bond flicks.
I noticed Richard Branson being frisked by airport security. Does he have some tie to the studio or the producers? How’d he land that cameo?
I actually thought that Bond might not have been rescued after Le Chiffre is shot by Mr. White, but might be in a very realistic virtual reality/drug-induced hallucination when the Swiss bank guy comes to get the password. Maybe I was overthinking it. The whole movie did seem to drag a bit after that - could have been tightened up in the editing room, I think.
Mr. White is definitely in for some unfriendly persuasion after Bond kneecaps him. Ouch. That was a great ending to the flick.
I think it was Ebert who suggested that “James Bond” might be a codename for a series of different MI6 agents, over the span of many years. Makes sense, given this reboot - and seeing Connery as a former Bond and future villain would fit nicely into that theory.
Was that the premise of the David Niven Royale?
Product placement. One of the jets on the runway was a Virgin Airways jet.
I have a few suggestions for the director. There are some things that are so easy to fix and would make the movie more realistic.
Bond does not hold the air of four men in his lungs. He’s only able to struggle for one minute underwater, total, and he only dribbles out bubbles, not gushing them.
The section head grabs and fires the gun at Bond in one motion so that he doesn’t notice it’s not loaded.
The guy Bond fights with at the museum exhibit doesn’t immediately die from being stabbed with a normal knife once. Figure out something else.
Bond is smart enough (yes he is, this one bugs me) to turn off the ignition while fighting for control of the fuel tanker. The baddie can then keep restarting it after fighting off Bond momentarily.
No matter what is in that tiny bomb at the airport, there simply aren’t enough molecules to get a really good explosion going. No one with that kind of brains and time and money would take the chance that the small explosion would ignite the fuel fumes and catch the plane on fire. They’d be carrying something else bigger. If you really want the bomb to explode the baddie, then work it out that Bond has put it back in the guy’s backpack or something. Figure it out, you’re the professionals.
Make it clearer who texted Bond about how to find Mr. White. I’ve seen it twice and I’m still clueless.
I agree with all of your suggestions. I’ve also seen it twice, and it took the second time to understand (I think) that Bond was looking at Vesper’s cell phone, which she (purposefully, I think) left in their hotel room; she’d left the text message for Bond herself (thinking that she wasn’t going to survive the day, I think).
That’s what I think, anyway.
Great movie, by the way. My expectations were pretty high, and it soared way, way above them.
It might not be as unrealistic as it seemed. I don’t remember exactly how the scene went down, but if I remember correctly he stabbed him in the kidney. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes about the method of killing a sentry with a knife taught to special ops troops in his book On Killing, and says that the preffered method isn’t sneaking up behind the person, clamping your hand over his mouth, and slitting his throat like you see in the movies; rather, it’s stabbing him in the kidney. The excruciating pain and shock leaves the sentry unable to even scream or move. That’s what I took to be happening, that Bond stabbed him in the kidney and left him there to die slowly and silently.
I agree, just as she left the information for him in her suicide note in the novel.