Tough guy.

THE first James Bond movie I saw was The Living Daylights, one of Timothy Dalton's two outings in the role, in which 007 foiled a nefarious arms dealer (is there any other kind?) and a rogue Russian general, helped rout the Soviets in Afghanistan, and romanced a beautiful cellist. The most memorable scene involved Bond and his lady friend using her case as a sled, riding it across the Swiss border to safety and shouting insouciantly: "Nothing to declare! Only a cello!" I was eight at the time, which is probably the perfect age to be introduced to a series that's always been a prepubescent boy's fantasy of what grown-up adventures are like--the gadgets and guns and the striking lack of gore, the National Geographic-meets-Tintin globetrotting, and the vision of sexual relations as little more than a series of really cool playdates.

Casino Royale, on the other hand, this autumn's attempt to kick-start the franchise by returning to its Ian Fleming roots, is meant to be something else entirely: Bond when he wasn't yet Bond, but just a handsome roughneck ill-at-ease in a tuxedo, by turns aggressive and vulnerable, capable of falling in love and even reconsidering his line of work. Bond for grown-ups, in other words--a man with a psychology and a history, a spy who sweats and bleeds and suffers, a hero who can't always save the damsel in distress.

This means stripping away most of the Bondian window dressing, the old familiars that have been associated with 007 since Sean Connery slipped into the tuxedo. This Bond's first car is a Ford (a rare product placement that amuses rather than appalls), not the expected Aston Martin; there's no Q and no gadgets; the stunts are unrealistic but not deliberately absurd. The villain is nefarious enough--a mournful swell named Le Chiffre (the Danish star Mads Mikkelsen), banker to the world's terrorists, who weeps blood from a damaged tear duct--but he's a smallish fish instead of a Goldfinger or a Blofeld, a middleman who spends half the movie trying to keep the sharks from swallowing him up. There's an actual actress--a smoldering Eva Green, rescued from the pretensions of Bertolucci's The Dreamers and the wreck of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven--playing the first of all the Bond girls, and she goes by Vesper Lynd, which is ludicrous but only mildly so compared to Xenia Onatopp, say, or Pussy Galore. And there's even gentle mockery of the absent 007 conventions: "Shaken or stirred?" a barman asks this Bond, and he fires back: "Do you think I give a damn?"

None of this should work. Bond isn't a once-serious icon gone to camp and boyish fantasy--he is a fantasy, and always has been, however seriously Ian Fleming may have taken him at first. The critics who draw distinctions between the silliness of the Roger Moore era and the supposedly grittier Connery and Pierce Brosnan epochs are ultimately splitting hairs: The last Brosnan installment, the spectacularly bad Die Another Day, earned over $400 million worldwide because it embodied, rather than betrayed, the qualities that made the Bond brand so successful. (Go watch the first Bond film, Dr. No, again if you don't believe me--the franchise was absurd from the beginning.) Strip away the cars and secret weapons, the lazy quips and the supervillains, and there shouldn't be anything left to keep the thing afloat. Nobody buys tickets for a Bond movie expecting John le Carre or Graham Greene, and nobody wants to.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

And yet Casino Royale is brilliant entertainment even so, and most of the credit belongs to Daniel Craig, the latest 007, who is so good in the role that he seems poised to steal the character out from under not only Brosnan, but Connery as well. The ur-Bond is remembered fondly by critics because he managed to add a hint of menace to all the gentleman-spy silliness--a faint undercurrent of adulthood for viewers bored by Oddjob and SPECTRE. But Connery wasn't much of an actor, and so he achieved this effect mainly by slapping his female co-stars around a bit, in between the usual martinis and rolls in the hay (he bedded Pussy Galore in a barn, if memory serves).

Craig, on the other hand, actually feels tough, with a coiled brutality that makes Connery's hairy-chested macho routine look, well, kind of sissy. (It's hard to imagine Austin Powers as a satire of this Bond.) He's a "blunt object," as Judi Dench's M puts it approvingly, who kills with a mix of satisfaction and self-loathing, and without any throwaway one-liners to remind us that it's all in good fun. The movie is trapped between the usual Bondian fantasyland (far too many scenes look like they were shot for a travel brochure) and a harder, bloodier reality, but Craig is superb enough to make this balancing act an unexpected strength--he plays Bond as a man caught in the same middle ground as the film, torn between the superman he's becoming and the humanity he's about to leave behind. His romance with Green's Lynd feels like a last, desperate stab at normalcy: She's a ladder out of his own private emptiness, and he reaches for her the way Gatsby (a role that Craig was born for) reached for Daisy Fay, and with the same disastrous consequences.

Whether this balancing act is sustainable over a longer run of films is an open question. By the end of Casino Royale, Craig's Bond seems securely on a path toward becoming the caricature that my eight-year-old self adored; without the grit of an origin story to tether him to earth, I imagine that future installments will regress toward the mean, and dreck like Die Another Day. But for now, at least, we can savor this unexpected holiday pleasure--a rare Bond for all seasons.