I don't know from poker or the movie, but there's quite a bit of debate about whether the rules were subverted.
Those comments are all about whether or not Bond was stupid for seeing the flop with his hole cards (5/7 suited, I think), which isn't about rules. You're allowed to play riskily. My quibble is different. Bond was the last one to raise; Le Chiffre called him. Bond is the aggressor—the one who gets called—thus, he is supposed to show his cards first; in fact, no one else has to show his cards at all.
Whereas, in the movie, he actually shows his hand last, thus allowing everyone to be relieved that his straight flush has beaten Le Chiffre's full house.
And according to Salon the dude who played the Parkouriffic bomber is one of Parkour's inventors! That should silence the commenter at Saiselgy's who scoffed disbelievingly.
I realize that this question is meaningless, since it's a Bond film, but was it actually any good? For its type, I mean?
That's pretty much all you can ask of a Bond film, thanks.
Does this comment thread need a spoiler alert?
I hate to tell you, Leblanc, but I think in the end Bond wins.
And the game isn't even the end of the film!
At least it's Daniel Craig this time. Brosnan is a total wuss.
12 gets it exactly right, without having actually seen the film. I said last week that Daniel Craig seemed "hard" and that Brosnan was an "effete, tea-drinking, ascot-wearer." That was wrong, wasn't it?
I mean that I haven't seen the film. I don't presume to know whether gswift has or has not seen it.
It's also kind of odd that Bond (apparently) thought so long about whether to stay in or not, since he had the nuts.
Ironically, given his later interactions with Le Chiffre.
I don't presume to know whether gswift has or has not seen it.
I haven't seen it either. With Brosnan I kept expecting him to slap a bad guy with his man tits.
The parkour sounds interesting, but I will stick with Rounders for all my poker-movie needs.
10: And the Bond girl dies. The Bond girl always dies, even Tracy Bond.
19 - Come now, Catherine Gale could handle a pantywaist like Auric Goldfinger.
I'm waiting for the screenwriters to resurrect the deadly bridge scene from the Moonraker novel. Talk about suspense!
20: Well, after the tragic gilding of Jill Masterson and the slicing of Tilly by Oddjob it would be wrong to have a third Bond girl snuffing in the same movie. Anyway, Pussy Galore is an honorary man.
19: The first Bond girl in the movie always dies. The second one usually survives.
My girls saw it last night. The 8 year old said there was too much death in it, and that it was scarier than the other Bond films they've seen. They liked it though.
I saw A View to a Kill at about that age, and it scared the everliving crap out of me. I wouldn't get near exhaust fans for a long time afterwards.
I will offer that this was, by far, the least silly Bond film. That does not mean it wasn't silly. (I'm talking to you, African terrorists with swords.) But there was some truly creepy psychological depth to Bond, who is pretty much a psychotic thug with excellent observational skills, and, for the first time ever, the Bond "girl" was actually a full-grown woman with a powerful job, emotional complexity, and a pseudonym (Harriet Broadchester?) that is laughed at and then ignored. The car porn is there, but not overdone. The chase porn is less about Bond's utter mastery over everything in the entire world and more about an actual struggle of muscle and wit. There are some knowing winks to the Bond-goer, but it's not one long raised-eyebrow mug.
I was doubtful, as Daniel Craig is a big square beefy thug and I thought Brosnan's "are you watching me?" smirk was the whole point, but I join the assembled and say I liked it and that it's worth seeing.
24: I thought this when I saw little kids at it. Other Bond films have, I think, even more death, but it's a cartoonish death or a super-stylish death. This one was all messy-strangling-in-a-dirty-bathroom-ish deaths.
He's squared and beefed up for the film though, hasn't he? He was fairly ordinary-looking in Enduring Love. It's nice to be so far away from Roger Moore hamming it up though. Now *I* need to see it!
They're pretty much ok with cinema death, having seen a variety of stuff here, and they were desperate to see it, so I warned them and sent them off. (Not alone.) But it doesn't sound like it's going to become a mid-afternoon Bank Holiday classic like most other Bonds.
(I'm talking to you, African terrorists with swords.)
Technically, I think they were machetes.
They didn't look like machetes, unless they were wicked-fancy machetes, which would be silly. I guess they didn't look much like swords, either. In any case, it was dumb and possibly racist. I half expected them to pull out spears or blowguns with poisoned darts.
Bond was quite bloody and beaten-up for most of the movie, which was an interesting change of pace. Not so much a pretty boy as in the other movies (and also more human-scale, as people are saying).
30: Well, yeah. It doesn't exactly make sense to be running around a Monte Carlo hotel carrying a blade as long as your arm. (I later wonder if maybe it's just that they used to get their supplies from Saddam.)
They did a good job with the chase/fight scenes. The thought that kept going through my head was "there's no way Brosnan could have pulled that off".
Well, if Brosnan had, he would have made it look like softshoe. Craig can't really do those things either, but at least they made it look hard to do them.
I guess I'm the only person who found it tedious. It seemed too long, yet still managed to feel half baked. I guess I just want a little different Bond movie than what I get here. I'd rather have lean, mean plot; tight action scenes that don't take 10 times longer than the response times of GWOT era security forces; and tons of little loose ends that add up to being yanked out of the narrative to have snarky internal monologues like, 'driving that badass Aston pretty slowly when the love of your life is hauled away by the badguys in a much slower car', 'how long does it take to sink a building in Venice', etc.. I fault Paul Haggis who seems to have come in and script doctored this thing into the emergency ward. Thumbs up to Daniel Craig, and Eva Green. She's perfect.
I'm just a guy who likes a good 90min movie instead of a bloated 144min. movie.
Why do you want tons of loose ends?
Well, it was originally brandished to threaten to cut off an arm (for which I imagine a machete is eminently suited). The other African did have a gun. So the questionable part is not that he had a machete in the first place, but that he didn't put it away and take out the gun he also presumably had.
Sometimes when I say one thing I really mean another. I would rather not have tons of loose ends.
I approve of the retention of the classic scene wipes. Line of dialogue, dramatic pause, wipe. Those alone made the movie for me.
3: Ben, since when one or more players are all in, everyone has to show there cards, the order doesn't make a huge bit of difference (though they should have had Bond and Le Chiffre show down first for the sidepot...)
The bigger problem, as I said at GolbSaiselgy, was that the bets were almost uniformly too small...
Bond, who is pretty much a psychotic thug
This was the case in the books. More and more you are making me interested in this movie, which is nice b/c it's been a while since I saw a Bond film out of anything but a sense of duty.
44: My gentleman, who read all the books, claims this was the closest to Fleming's plot and characters he'd seen.
44: Vesper: "The killing, it doesn't bother you?"
Bond: "If it did, I couldn't do my job, now could I?"
Or something like that. Finally, the movie captures the sociopath/sadist of the novels.
I'm with the guys at Yglesias who point out that Bond might well have gotten to see the flop in a four-hand game, especially given that Bond was the big stack (he calls everyone and busts them all out). There's plenty of poker pros who would play in a situation like that, I think. The wackiness is other things (like Bond showing last).
Did they change the ending at all from the Peter Sellers version?
The best line in the movie -- vis a vis Bond as borderline psycho -- is the one where Bond says to Vesper Lind:
"You're not my type."
"Smart?", she replies.
"Single", he says.
I was pretty ambivalent about the film after. I liked Craig in it*, the Parkour chase scene is great, and Eva Green is very good, but the script had some incredibly* clunking lines. A couple of which had the audience in the cinema I was in laughing out loud -- and they weren't supposed to be funny lines.
* my wife confirms that he looks like a psychopathic thug, but you know, in a good/sexy way ...
** i.e., full-on embarrassing ...
What happens between the torture scene and Bond waking up? In particular, who called the two MI-6 guys to come in and taser Mathis? Because my answer is that no one had both the opportunity and motive to do this.
For that matter, torturing Bond for the password: huh? If they had gotten it, they just would have gone to the banker, said "Despite what you may have heard from the many witnesses, Bond didn't win. I did, and I will now take the money." Why would the banker allow that? If the answer is because they'd be threatening to kill him, can't they threaten to kill him whether or not they have Bond's password? Bond's password isn't for the escrow account. In fact, what was his password for?
The password was to transfer the money from the escrow account to the account of the winner's choosing, I thought.
Right, but given that the banker is only going to ask someone for their password after the banker knows that person is the winner, what is the password verifying?
This is the same question as: why couldn't Le Chiffre have saved himself the trouble of torturing Bond, tortured the banker, and entered his own password?
I figured they entered the winner into the computer thing after the game was over, so that only that person's password would work.
This is just guessing, though. The plots of these sorts of movies tend to fall apart if you look at them too closely; it's best to admire from afar.