He can look good in a tuxedo and trade sexed-up banter, but that’s not why he’s there. There’s no louche decadence to Craig’s Bond. It added a few ideas of its own as well.Ĭasino Royale was, of course, Daniel Craig’s first shot at playing Bond, and it did everything it possibly could to separate Craig from every previous Bond. And in so doing, it drew ideas from across the mid-’00s action-movie landscape. But 2006’s Casino Royale is the first movie that realized the series could be something else.

At their best, they’ve been very good B-movies. The Bond character himself might be an icon of hedonistic, unflappable British Cold War toughness, but the movies themselves have always been B-movies, albeit expensive ones. But that movie still opened with a no-parachute skydiving chase scene that practically gives me a panic attack every time I watch it. Most of us can probably agree that 1979’s Moonraker, with its Star Wars-biting space-battle climax, is a massive low point for the series. Some of the worst Bond movies have some of the best scenes. But even if they were more about consequence-free fun, the Bond movies really have cast a shadow over the genre for as long as the genre has existed.Īs silly as the Bond movies could get-and they could get very silly-they’ve always been good for at least one absolutely breathtaking action scene. The thrills of the Bond movies were the Saturday-morning serial types: How will our hero get out of this jam? I tend to prefer the Bullitt take on the genre: The stoic intensity, the white-knuckle action scenes, the sense that people could really get hurt at any moment. The Bond movies essentially turned the action movie into a formula before it was even really a genre: An aspirational larger-than-life hero, a comic-book villain, a few showstopping set pieces, a couple of chuckles. But a strong case-maybe a stronger case-could also be made that the genre starts with 1962’s Dr. When I started this column, I decided that the modern action movie began with Bullittin 1968.

Casino royale and the cold war