Or let’s even stay in franchise here: with a title like Octopussy, what do you really expect? Sadly my first Bond experience wasn’t Octopussy, it was Casino Royale, which could have easily been titled “Poker and Stunts”.

Our principle character is Bond; James Bond, and that’s really all we are ever going to learn about our main protagonist. Actually, there are two other things we learn; and only two:

1. James Bond is a fully qualified stuntman. A fact we learn over and over…and over again in the first thirty useless minutes of the film.

2. When the film actually gets around to its self, we learn that he is also omnipotent and omniscient.

Bond breaks into M’s apartment. How? The movie said he could. Bond hacks into a computer network using M’s name and password. How did he get these things? The movie said he could. How interesting would it have been to actually see how Bond is able to do these things rather than the film just giving him permission to do so?

As a matter of fact as Casino Royale goes on we soon learn that the film is doing pretty much everything for him. Bond can’t afford to stay in the game? No problem. The movie will come along and dump money into his lap. Bond finds him self in an impregnable torture chamber? No problem. The movie will burst through the door and bail him out.

By the movie of course I mean all the plot conveniences it dumps into the film. There are no surprises allowed, even when it looks like there might be a surprise here and there. The film will not allow it's self to be veered into anything interesting or unexpected. It is totally on auto pilot, and so are we.

As far as characters go, there really aren’t any to speak of. Judy Dench always brings her A game to any role, but unfortunately she amounts to little more than a cameo in this film: Three scenes, about two lines of dialogue per scene; none of which amounts to much. As for Bonds love interest…she’s James Bond. I’m serious; they’re both the same blank vacuous character the movie gives lines to.

They say the same things, do the same things, perform the same actions right down to each giving the other something they don’t want to wear. Why didn’t they just make Bond's love interest a mirror, or just re-play his scenes one after the other?

They try to give the female lead some room to grow here and there, but even that falls on its face every time. After witnessing James strangle a man to death she utters the words “It feels like there’s blood on my hands and it won’t come off”, which might have made sense if she had actually killed someone. (WTF?)

In between the stunts, shallow characters and awful dialogue is one long boring card game that I wouldn’t have cared about no matter what was at steak. Sure they try to mix things up with throwing terrorists into the hotel and Bond being poisoned, but these are forgotten about as soon as they are dispatched and the film goes right on with the boring card game as if they had never happened. 

All of this might have been forgivable if this film had been camp like the original Bond films. Granted I haven’t seen any of them, but they all look like a lot of light hearted fun. This Bond film tries to have its cake and eat it too. It wears its seriousness on its sleeve while feeding us scenes that are just as hokey and ridiculous as the camp Bond films. A plane just happens to land right when they drive to that part of the runway…sure.

The end of this movie is really just the beginning of the next. Maybe if they had made the movie we were actually watching anything more than a stunt fest I might have been inclined to see the next one. Instead, I think I might treat my self to the classic Bond films next time.

I freely confess that James Bond probably just isn’t my bag baby, but that doesn’t stop Casino Royale from being a contrived mess. Maybe the other films were too, but from what I can tell that was at least forgivable and maybe it even added to their charm, I don’t know. But there was nothing charming, or exciting, or interesting or fun about this movie. It was just plain bad.