Casino Royale vs Die Hard

Listen, I’m not going to tell you that Casino Royale is the best Bond movie ever, and I’m not going to say that Daniel Craig is the best James Bond ever. Prequels set us up for this kind of thing all the time. It’s the idea not only that the filmmakers are establishing an official backstory for the character, but that they’re also establishing official casting of the character. When George Lucas went back to film the Star Wars prequels, he wasn’t just saying, This is how it happened; he was also saying, Oh yeah, it was this dumb kid all along.

But, the James Bond series holds a distinction among others in that it’s not a series at all. There isn’t one cohesive story to follow, no plot tying them all together. Aside from the character of James Bond, they have nothing in common. You could watch them in any order and they would still make sense, not counting the ones that don’t make any sense in the first place. With Casino Royale, the Bond franchise gets, for the first time, a movie that seems as if it might fit into a larger story. It might not officially be a prequel, and there’s no Roman Numeral One anywhere in the title. But for my money, if you’re looking for a place to start with the Bond franchise, you absolutely cannot do better than Casino Royale. Bond movies are always fun, but few come close to being as big a rush as Casino Royale. An early, wordless chase through a construction site is one of the most visceral in any action movie, with Craig’s Bond catching a much more agile and graceful character by crashing into girders and busting head-first through drywall.

This is the James Bond we get in Casino Royale: no gadgets, a stolen car, a borrowed suit, cuts and bruises. This James Bond gets seriously pissed, kills too many people, doesn’t introduce himself, and has no particular drink preference.  When he’s secretly dosed with poison, he chugs salt water till he pukes. He rocks. He may or may not have an adamantium steel skeleton. I’m pretty sure he can see in the dark. Daniel Craig is up for every badass challenge of Casino Royale, but luckily for us he’s up for the quieter moments as well, since this Bond movie has more character development and actual character interaction than any other that comes to mind. Bond movies, as much as I like them, are usually just occasions for a string of set-pieces. Halle Berry and Pierce Brosnan have fun and are well-matched in Die Another Day, but no more so than their respective stunt performers. In Casino Royale, Craig is paired with Eva Green, who, like many of the classic Bond femmes, is vaguely European, mysterious and sexy in all the right ways, but also an intelligent foil for Bond. No wonder he falls in love with her. We know it won’t end well; her character isn’t in the other Bond movies. But their time together is poignant and believable. Likewise, Bond gets more time on-screen with M, played with great panache and frustration by Judi Dench. M seems pretty sure that Bond will wind up dead or fired before his current mission is over, and for a while there it seems like she might be right.

Casino Royale was directed by Martin Campbell (when was the last time anyone cared to know who directed a Bond movie?). Campbell stages much of Casino Royale in a thoroughly modern way (everything looks spectacular), but with none of the now-tacky and clichéd marks of current special effects. He prefers a chase on foot to one in invisible cars; a knotted rope to a laser beam. His villain is the bloody-eyed Le Chiffre (played by Mads Mikkelson, who should just use his own name the next time he plays a bad guy), who’s mainly out for money, and goes after it through simple means, like poker and the aforementioned knotted rope. As a result, Casino Royale pays tribute/owes a bit of debt not necessarily to the earlier Bond movies, but to Steve McQueen circa 1968, Michael Caine circa 1971, and Bruce Willis circa 1988.

That’s right. Every redo, prequel, fresh start and beginning we’ve seen in the past couple decades can be traced to Die Hard.

Die Hard came out during Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone’s run of action movies; the ones where the heroes were cartoonishly musclebound, grunted wisecracks, and never flinched or bled. In Die Hard, Bruce Willis looks like hell. Dude is living wrong, not getting enough sleep, and probably divorce-bound. But he’s in a high-rise full of terrorists, and he’s the closest to a tough-guy anyone can hope for. That he’s barefoot, bloodied and pretty much terrified doesn’t matter. Die Hard brought us the everyman hero, which we barely remembered (and some of us had never seen in the first place). He was in an awful situation, but he did his best, like we all hope we might under the same circumstances. When Daniel Craig was cast as Bond, all the obnoxious gossipy fanboys on the message boards got all up in arms because he was blonde, or skinny, or too Layer Cakey or Munich-ish or whatever. Can you imagine what Bruce Willis would have gone through if the internet had been around during the casting for Die Hard? An action movie where a guy has to swing from a fire hose while machine-gunning a window? Barefoot? And they cast that smartass from Moonlighting?

Thankfully, John McTiernan was turned down by Schwarzenegger and Stallone, and got a movie that influenced pretty much every action movie since then, from The Fugitive to Speed and, of course, Casino Royale.

Casino Royale: A
Die Hard: A