That’s how Poker games will always end – one player having a better hand than the other. It’s impossible to win on a bluff because once your opponent has all of his chips in the middle, they can’t fold(and why would they – they have literally nothing left to lose).
Hold’em games often end on 2 big hands because both players need to feel comfortable going all in with their hand, and you’re not going to do that with a weak hand unless you’re really short stacked.
I liked it, although the love story at the end dragged it on for a while.
Poker works, and I am not a poker fan. Sorry Baccarrat lovers, but that is the game of a long -gone era when Bond movies just had to be set in exotic locations to be attractive. This worked in the era when there was no Discovery/Travel channel showing you what the world looks like outside your neighborhood. Baccarrat belongs in those days. Bacarrat is the equivelant of listening to Zitar and Indian music in your ‘pad’ with your hippie friends and their stupid striped pants.
Daniel Craig works. He is what Timothy Dalton could have been had he been given the right scripts & direction, rather than having to pick up discarded ‘Pierce Bronson can’t make it yet…still living down ‘Remington Steele’’ scripts.
I like the tough-but-clever thuggish bond as opposed to the Tuxedo boys they’ve had over the years. The martini jokes were hilarious (first he picks up the wrong drink…then later he orders a complicated one and everyone at the table wants ‘one of those’ as well.)
The genre was exhausted, this movie refreshed it.
Poker is a game of rednecks, Baccarat of sophisticated Europeans, who can spell. 
So the same folks that gave us World Wars and Socialism also gave us the world’s must unskilled card game. I’ll stick with the rednecks, thanks. 
…but…but…but that’s what a Bond film is all about, at least the Roger Moore ones that I grew up on. You KNEW what was going to happen. There was always a scene with the lovelorn Moneypenny, a “gadget” scene with Q, Bond seducing a beautiful woman, and always ending with some sort of double entendre.
BTW, Daniel Craig as Bond. Me likey.
You’re right, let’s steer clear of foreign entanglements.
Seriously, how does it differ from Blackjack?
I wouldn’t mind being entangled with Vesper Lynd in that movie. Except at the end, of course.
Well, DUH! 
Fleming always decribed the food and booze more thoroughly and affectionately than the women and the sex. It’s like porn for gourmands.
I liked the way that it toyed with our Bond film expectations, then deliberately undercut them. The car chase has already been mentioned: Bond roars off in hot pursuit of the abducted girl in an Aston Martin, but instead of a prolonged, gadget-ridden chase he simply rolls it on the first corner.
The shower scene was similar: the girl’s huddled shocked under the water. Bond asks her, “Cold?”, but instead of her nod being a cue for hot sex, he turns on the hot tap and sits next to her: beautifully understated.
Ditto the torture scene: after capturing Bond, instead of strapping him into an elaborate machine and wandering off, Le Chiffre simply ties him to a chair and beats on his nuts with a length of knotted rope - cue winces from the entire male audience.
The violence really reminded me of Martin Campbell’s old 70’s TV spy show “The Professionals”, where if a character shoulder-charged a door, he’d spend the episode with his arm in a sling; if he were hit on the head with a lump of wood, he’d be in a hospital bed with a fractured skull and in a medically induced coma.
You really got that in the first “flashback” fight, where Bond makes his bones: this is what a licence to kill entails, not wry quips and a Walther PPK, but a vicious clawing struggle in a public toilet, culminating in drowning your adversary in the sink. To be a 00, you need to be a ruthless sociopath: Bond is not a good guy.
That’s why Vesper’s betrayal was so heart-breaking: Bond saw what he was becoming, didn’t like it, and she was a chance to try and salvage what was left of his soul before it was too late.
More later, perhaps: dinner time.
I’ll go against the flow here and agree (somewhat) with the OP. Apart from the brilliant opening chase, this movie was STILL filled to the brim with over-the-top silliness. Since I had heard that this would be a fresh style of Bond, I was expecting at least some subtlety and real spy intrigue. Instead, the only difference from other recent Bond movies is that this one was not afraid to get more violent, more brutal.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but aside from the opening sequence, none of the other action sequences were clever or suspenseful at all! It was just “grittier”, but without some sort of creative spark, it’s just as boring. The final building-destroying sequence was just lame and derivative of other lame action movies. The whole poison/rescusitation bit was similarly boring. The love story accompanied by that silly music had us laughing. Etc, etc.
They should have let Guy Ritchie direct this one. Bond could’ve used a little more Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels…
I too liked Craig’s Bond. Much closer to the Bond in the books, who is pretty much a total bastard. Bond shouldn’t really be a likeable character. I did like the films wherein Bond is played much more sympathetically, and i’m happy to ignore the characterisation (because it’s necessary) but I did enjoy them making Bond as much of a SOAB as they did.
In terms of the player’s ability to PLAY vs being a spectator, they’re pretty similar if the blackjack player is following a set system of play. Skim over the Wikipedia entry on Baccarat, there are a couple of versions. The american version, all the player really does is choose “player” or “banker” and wait for chips to be taken/given. The “Bond” version seems a bit more like blackjack, where the player is asked if he wants another card, though he’s pretty much required to take/refuse in most circumstances and gets a true choice only when his hand adds up to 5.
The problem is that Lillet no longer makes Kina. Lillet Blanc (with a few drops of bitters added in, perhaps) makes an acceptible substitute. I generally leave out the lemon, use Beefeater or Plymouth as the gin, and despite Bond’s exposition about how grain vodkas are better than those made from potatoes, I use Blue Ice Russett Potato Vodka. It all makes for a fine cocktail which takes the edge off of a gin martini without adding excessive sweetness.
Stranger
Remember how right before this chase, they watch a fight between a mongoose and a cobra? The mongoose is twistier and more agile, but the cobra can use a technology (venom) that the mongoose can’t. I really want to make this work as foreshadowing for the chase, with the terrorist as the mongoose and Bond as the cobra. My wife thinks it’s a stretch.
Definitely great post, Stranger!
Daniel
What?? Paging Otto…
In that metaphor, I would have made the bomber the snake (strong, fast) and Bond (quick-witted, aggressive) the mongoose. But yeah, however it was intended, I think it was deliberate foreshadowing. There’s actually quite a bit of foreshadowing in the film, and a deliberate use of color. Notice how, in the Vence pursuit sequence, Vesper is the only person wearing red–clearly a deliberate choice to allow Bond to follow her and avenge her inevitable death–where everybody in the background is wearing whites and browns. The story and script in most Bond films are just frameworks about which to show action pieces set in gorgeous locales. *Casino Royale managed to do that too (although the Czech Republic had to stand in for Montenegro), but also had some excellent dialogue and interesting plotting.
Stranger
I actually liked the fact that in the end, it basically was a matter of luck. Bond tells Vesper that poker isn’t a game of luck, it’s a game of skill and reading the other player, but ultimately he’s wrong and she’s right - he fails at reading Le Chiffre, and ends up getting the winning hand out of pure luck.
Bond chose to go “all in” on the last round of betting and did so knowing that he held the highest possible hand for the cards shown (a straight flush). Although he was “lucky” to get that hand, once he had it going “all in” was a no-brainer. His real luck was his position as being the last one to bet, therefore being able to raise the pot on Le Chiffre and forcing him to also throw in. The skill in Texas Hold 'Em is being able to gauge the probability of getting the high hand on the post-flop deal and betting accordingly.
Stranger
Bond fails to read Le Chiffre correctly only because either Vesper or Mathis informs Le Chiffre that Bond has noticed his ‘tell’ i.e the twitch Le Chiffre gives when he is bluffing. Le Chiffre, armed with this information, subsequently gives the twitch mannerism when he is not bluffing.
That was one of two things I found really unbelievable about the movie, actually: that a high-stakes poker player would have such an obvious tell. I could be wrong, but I’d think that tells for players with that much experience would be things like a reddening of their neck when they’re lying, or a nervousness to their gaze, or a flatness to their voice–something much harder for them to spot and eliminate. Sure, the tell was obvious for the audience’s sake, but it annoyed me as too obvious.
I can’t remember what the second thing was. It was something to do with the bank transfer, though–something about that interaction suggested extreme incompetence on the part of MI5 or MI6 or whoever.
Daniel