The supremely silly idea is that Bond, that über-amateur card-player, will relieve Le Chiffre of all his money - and thus, the terrorists of all their resources - at a single high-rollers' card game, although the game is not chemin de fer, but a rather more déclassé one of poker. M even implies that manipulating airline stock prices was a motivating factor for 9/11 - a sly piece of cynicism that would have amused Fleming himself. His spurs earned, Bond must now tackle his first super-villain: Le Chiffre, banker to Smersh in the original, now accountant and financier to international terrorists everywhere, though al-Qaida and anyone else from the Middle East are coyly left unmentioned. After a very nasty and violent killing in a men's room, shot in grainy monochrome, Bond earns his official double-0 rating with a second wet job: the unofficial whacking of a traitor in the higher reaches of MI6.

This is the story of James Bond's beginning, transferred forward in time to a loosely imagined post-9/11 present. The key to his X-factor is that Craig looks as if he would be equally at home playing a Bond villain. With Craig's unsmiling demeanour and his unfashionably, even faintly un-British dirty blond hair, he looks like a cross between the Robert Shaw who grappled with Bond in From Russia With Love and Patrick McGoohan's defiant Prisoner. He's easily the best Bond since Sean Connery, and perhaps even - well, let's not get carried away. He has effortless presence and lethal danger he brings a serious actor's ability to a fundamentally unserious part he brings out the playfulness and the absurdity, yet never sends it up. Daniel Craig is a fantastic Bond, and all those whingers and nay-sayers out there in the blogosphere should hang their heads in shame.Ĭraig was inspired casting. Now he has taken on the mantle of 007, and the result is a death-defying, sportscar-driving, female-back-fondling, cocktail-recipe-specifying triumph.

But that's enough about his performance as Ted Hughes. On the big screen, Daniel Craig has shown himself fully capable of taking on a British icon: a man of cool, cruel determination, mesmerising sex appeal and a fatally destructive way with women.

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