I think the critics are being amazingly kind to GoldenEye and Die Another Day, both of which I thought were atrocious movies.
All of this is IMHO:
Until Casino Royale, all James Bond movies - all of them - were absolute shit. Every single one. The only one I have even the slightest admiration for would be Goldfinger. I might be being a tiny bit unfair to the early Connery films in terms of my assessment of their production values, but every Bond film was formulaic, stupid, predictable, and time after time seemed shockingly cheap. The direction was amateurish, the acting shit, the editing half-assed, and the production values varied wildly from pretty good to sub-professional levels (up until the Dalton/Brosnan films, which had high production values but were just idiotic.)
Of course, this is a pretty big thing for me to say, even IMHO, when it comes to a series of two dozen films long beloved by so many fans, so I feel obliged to try to explain why I’m saying a series of unbelievably awful movies keep making money, and thankfully, a Mormon half-wit with a love of vampires has given me the perfect analogy:
James Bond is the man’s answer to "Twilight."
James Bond movies are just Twilight for men. If you want a different analogy, James Bond is the cinematic equivalent of Playboy magazine; it’s stupid and appeals to men’s most base interests, but it does it well. James Bond is the superstud of all time. He goes around the world gambling at casinos, humping beautiful women, and killing people. He has an unlimited supply of money, chicks, and gadgets. He’s everything a man wants to be. When people, usually guys, pay to see a James Bond film, they know they’re going to get that.
If you culd take a time machine and go back and reshoot any James Bond movie - Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, it doesn’t matter - and did it exactly the same except you cast a different but equally talented actor in the lead role and branded it as a generic spy thriller instead of James Bond, so people just thought it was some new action movie and not attached to the Bond franchise in any way, it would have been booed off the screen. “Thunderball” was on the other night and I was just flabbergasted at how bad a movie it was. Even by the standards of its time, it was just excruciating. Even “GoldenEye,” were it not a James Bond film, would have been regarded as an absolute shitpile - not as bad as a real turkey like Ecks vs. Sever, but no way it would have gotten 80% on the Tomatometer. Critics would have said “Meh, its got some action, but it’s pretty bad all in all.”
(Again, I make an exception for Goldfinger, which has many of the weaknesses of other Bond films but is generally better acted and seems more clever and original in some ways.)
Okay, so now along comes Casino Royale. Here’s why I like it; again, totally IMHO, Casino Royale is the first-ever attempt to make a James Bond movie that is actually a well-written spy thriller irrespective of the fact that it’s a James Bond movie. It’s got its up and downs, but it’s not stupid like the previous ones. That, in part, is why Daniel Craig’s Bond is so different; he has to be. Previous Bonds were just cartoon characters (conceding that occasionally they showed some humanity, especially Brosnan’s Bond. But not often.) Daniel Craig/Bond actually looks, sounds and acts like a hired killer. They worked in the Bond basics - M, his skill with the chicks, and even gambling, but still, Craig/Bond is not a silly playboy. He’s an assassin in the employ of a regional superpower that does not fuck around when it comes to killing people that need killing. The movie flows logically from that starting point - and for all its weaknesses, that’s what makes it interesting and, in total, a much better movie than its predecessors.
