Directed by: Martin Campbell  Starring:  Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini

Forty years after the celluloid introduction of the ultimate macho character, it turns out that James Bond can bleed, err, and fall in love after all; obviously there was a time, too, when he did not particularly care whether his martini was shaken or stirred and when he had to bring bad guys down without the cop-out assistance of preposterous gadgets in the form of invisible cars, deadly pens and what have you.

You see, it was getting intolerably tiresome to sit through two hours of outlandish action knowing that the tuxedoed protagonist will bed a good and a bad girl and will eventually triumph over yet another evil megalomaniac.

Luckily, the descendants of Cubby Broccoli still producing the series, thought so, too. True, our man Bond prevails again, eventually, but pays oh so dearly - his capacity for love is all but spent; his reproductive faculties are brutally assaulted. And when the dust settles and when the last bullet hits the target, you are left pondering the notion that this human Bond might just be the best ever.  

Casino Royale is the original Ian Fleming novel introducing the character (which did not make the screen until now because of problems with the filming rights). This seems to be the missing the piece of fiction (and action) that details the origins of the faultless, suave killing machine. The mission of bringing this to the screen is entrusted to Martin Campbell, who has already managed once to save the longest-running franchise in cinema. Yet while his Goldeneye and the introduction of Pierce Brosnan as Bond were a successful re-energising of the series within the established paradigm, Casino Royale feels more like a daring reboot, and a successful one at that.

A large part of the credit goes to bold choice for Brosnan's successor. While Clive Owen was the more obvious choice all the while, the people who had seen the abundance of charisma and cool displayed by Daniel Craig in Layer Cake were rightly rooting for him. To say he does not disappoint is a glaring understatement. He is brutal, unrelenting, stylish and, crucially, human. At the very beginning he earns his licence to kill - the proverbial "double 0" status - in a brutal and violently inelegant sequence in a men's loo and he simply takes it from there.

The film is very distinctly divided into three parts, which, in hindsight, serve a particular purpose and, more importantly, click reasonably well together. Interestingly, the requisite bit meant to please the traditional fans is dealt quickly, if expertly, solely in the first half of the film. There is the customary tour of the Bond vistas (Bahamas, Miami, Prague), rousing action sequences veering into the impossible (on a construction site in Madagascar and at Miami airport), bedding the wife of a bad guy (Caterina Murino), etc. With that out of the way, Casino Royale slips into the plot of the Fleming novel, which is its most winning part.

MI6 is after the mysterious Le Chiffre (a very good Mads Mikkelsen), a banker to the world's pool of terrorists who plays the stock market, whose fluctuations he seemingly likes to engineer himself. His latest bet worth $100 million was thwarted by Bond, which means that some very nasty people would come knocking on his door asking for their money.

In view of this, Le Chiffre, a mathematical genius of sorts, stages an invitation-only card game in Casino Royale in Montenegro during which he intends to recoup the losses. MI6 is determined not to allow Le Chiffre to win and their sporting plan is to bankroll an agent to participate in the game. That agent is of course Bond. Her Majesty's Treasury commissions an accountant of theirs to keep an eye on the money and Bond; her name is Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) and a couple of tasty exchanges signal that Bond might have met a female equal. Yet while the crossfire of elegant insults punctuates their common progress, their armour begins to melt, helped by a corporate bonding exercise of sorts - their chases down a staircase and almost being killed by a machete-wielding thug.

Putting aside the minor nuisance that the hands at the cards table are highly unlikely to happen in real life, the card game sequences generate real suspense, boast some of the movie's most inspired lines and showcase a truly electric chemistry and tension between Bond and his adversary. The latter is reprised in a torture scene, which is both the most shocking in a Bond film ever and one where Craig assumes the Bond mantle for good. It also extends the new notion that the movie's villain has worse enemies than our protagonist, and that the world's most evil men are always lurking sinisterly off camera.

At first glance, the third part is needlessly protracted and filled with romantic filler, but hindsight lends it eerie poignancy. There is a truly tragic twist that has a surprising emotional punch, which goes a long way in explaining Bond's future attitude towards women and love and brilliantly leads to the most satisfying delivery of "Bond, James Bond".

The supporting cast is very good where it matters. Mikkelsen never goes over the top and is the better for it; Giancarlo Giannini is solid as the resident British agent in Montenegro, but crucially it is the radiant Miss Green who manages the right mix of biting intelligence and vulnerability which makes for a credible object of Bond's affection. The only minor grievance is Judy Dench, the single onscreen remnant of the Pierce Brosnan era, who soullessly walks through her part as M, and one feels she could have done much better with her scenes, especially the one where she ruminates about the upsides of the Cold War. Jeffrey Wright, too, is largely underused as CIA agent Felix Leiter, and one would think that he may appear again somewhere along the line.

The screenwriting team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, abetted by the Oscar specialist Paul Haggis, deserves special praise for constructing a plot that holds reasonably well together, if admittedly at the cost of the rather extravagant 144-minute run time. The dialogue has bite and elegance that allows Craig to shine as Bond and for once makes us truly want another Bond movie beyond the Pavlovian reflex that tells us there will be one anyway.