Reinvention often seems to entail a pretense towards realism, seriousness, and depth. Like the turning of the Batman series towards pragmatism and an emphasis on psychology, the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, returns to adapting an Ian Fleming novel in an attempt to re-tailor the series along with its new lead, Daniel Craig, to a more down-to-earth tone, replete with more “character” and less outlandishness. This Bond film, however, goes too far; bypassing low-key realism, director Martin Campbell (of the earlier, fantastic Bond re-invention GoldenEye) and screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis, go straight to non-descript. After a painfully self-conscious pre-title sequence with lousy black and white photography and a pretense towards thriller semantics (modernist architecture, low angles!), the film positively strains to be taken seriously in its very average gravity. Casino Royale reforms the Bond-world as a regular one—the world of espionage and world-domination plots in the film is one considerably more plain-faced, inelegant, and sensible than in the past—with the difference and the edge springing from the newness and particularity of Daniel Craig, but the film instead ends up describing the entire Bond-world in terms without distinction, losing the series' charm and individuality.

Daniel Craig himself is a magnificent James Bond. He returns the series to the masculine physicality of the Connery era but ups the brutishness of his physical presence, rubbing your face in Craig's bulky, almost lurching power. The combination of the brute-physical hero and the classy 007 moniker and espionage milieu is like a wonderfully sophisticated revision of the long-dead Stallone/Schwarzenegger action films of the 80s and 90s. It is a direct admission that the contemporary Bond has become more of an action star than a spy, and while the film never forgets the series' rather erratic sophistication, Martin smartly keeps the machine guns out of Craig's hands. In other words, the new Bond has all the coil of the action star, but it is kept churning below the surface. This edge of the dual presence is best expressed in the significant amount of physical combat Bond has to content with rather than gunfights. The first and best action sequence in Casino Royale shows it all right up front, ditching guns for acrobatics—the villain's frightful agility versus Craig's powerhouse perseverance and brute strength. Similarly, Bond's more plebian class background is brought out both by Craig's gorilla body, craggy face and steely eyes, but also by Bond-girl Eva Green's estimation of the character's orphanhood and embittered, patronized schooling. This all makes the simple on-screen presence of Craig all the more riveting, and helps texture his influence in returning the series to the interesting hints of sadism and cold-heartedness of the Connery embodiment.

But while the film gets Craig's interpretation of the hero ever so right, it gets most of the movie surrounding him ever so plain. In this Bond film we see our hero drive a Ford because, when traveling to the Bahamas, it is a more believable rental car. We even see the main villain, Mads Mikkelsen's terrorism fundraiser Le Chiffre, actually swipe his hotel key card to enter his generic suite at the titular Casino Royale! There is a difference between avoiding outlandishness and moving straight toward the more unimaginative aspects of the real world. Is this the realism that will ground the character, the series? It is the realism of plainness, of a lack of inspiration; of the series going to the Bahamas, Montenegro and Venice not for the sexy spy tourism of the Connerys or the exoticism of the Roger Moore films, but rather of tedious necessity—the locations are part of the story, so here they are, there they go, who cares. The plainness of the centerpiece Casino room for our hero's poker showdown with the strenuously ungimmicky Le Chiffre (he's just a financier, with a bleeding eye!), the faceless décor and beds, the rote, Die Hardish airport chase, the murder that fails to take advantage of its bizarre setting at the body exhibit—all are arbitrary, are achingly unstylized, and brazenly out of touch with sexiness, both in lifestyle and in cinema.

Fleeting moments do connect between Craig and the film. The witty banter between Green and Craig when they first meet on the train, echoing Hitchcock, sets up a fire, a kick, and a resistance in Green's character that is painfully shortcutted by bad writing through the rest of the film. Better yet is the simple physical expression of Craig cleaning the blood—theirs and his—off himself after a fight. Or the simple psychological expression of an all-too-short nocturnal pursuit of Eva Green and her kidnappers, Bond spying a chromatic glimpse of Green's apparition in his car's headlights in the middle of the road, jerking the car spasmodically away, and rolling it in ghostly terror that this girl has actually got to him, that he is worried, that he actually feels for someone. These are the best moments of the new Bond, the ones that make no pretense or strain to spell out the difference in the film, coast through episode after episode on non-descriptness, or make sadly heavy-handed attempts at character depth. Instead they are expressed through the normal movement of the plot, the end of the fight, the requisite car chase, feeling and subtlety erupting in these regular moments. The expressions are so small and so few and far between that they become profound, catch one off guard, and are moving in a way Bond films rarely reach for, let alone accomplish. This is high praise indeed, and it is moments like these and Craig's off-the-line potential that bodes well for the next film, given a smart script and a skilled director.