A Few Quibbles With Casino Royale
2006-12-15 18:15:46
By:
Gene Bromberg
If you haven't seen
Casino Royale yet I heartily recommend it. It's a welcome departure from the gimmick-driven Bond films of the last decade or so and returns 007 to his gritty, violent, amoral roots. We don't see the debonair Roger Moore knock out a thug with a backhand chop to the neck, with nary a speck of blood on his white dinner jacket. Oh no. Instead we see Daniel Craig's face criss-crossed with scars and smeared with blood. And we also what happens to the unfortunates who make the mistake of getting in his way. Bond is what he is--a professional killer fighting the bad guys.
Of course, one of the reasons
Casino Royale has gotten so much attention in the
poker community is because...there's a lot of
poker in it! One of the major plotlines involves Bond playing in a ten-person, $150 million
poker tournament against a terrorist financier named Le Chiffre. That, my friends, is one hell of a sit-n-go.
I don't want to spoil the fun for those of you who haven't seen the movie, but quite a few people have asked me how the
poker was in the flick. Was it realistic, was it done well, was it cool? And my answers to those questions would be:
Making
poker an interesting dramatic subject in a movie is difficult, for many reasons. Chief among them is this one--while it's estimated that 50 million Americans
play poker, that leaves 250 million who don't. And, come now, how many of those 50 million who say they play poker really have a clue? Certainly not the guy last night who called my all-in with only an inside straight draw against my top set. Of course he hit his four-outer, but that's an hysterical rant for another day.
So at some point you have to explain the rules of the game, which, as NPR's Mike Pesca explained in
his excellent podcast about the movie (warning, spoilers galore), means that you're going to bore the people who know how to play and confuse those who don't. The film
Rounders got around this by making the opening scene of the movie a tutorial not only about
poker but the underground clubs where it's played.
Poker was a central topic of that movie, while it's only one of many threads in
Casino Royale.
This presents a problem for the director/screenwriter/whomever. You want the
poker action to be riveting...but at the same time it has to be obvious enough that even the Hold-Em deficient can figure out what's going on. True, it might be more compelling to see Bond win a huge pot by calling with pocket threes when the board reads K-K-9-J-Q and his foe has just ace-high...but is the general audience going to GET that? Are they going to understand what just happened? Are they going to quickly figure out that Bond actually won? And that he made an incredible call to do so? Probably not.
And so the big confrontations we see in
Casino Royale are some pretty sick hands. "Pretty sick" being my euphemism for hands that would make me lie on the floor in the fetal position while rocking back and forth. For a week.
In his
podcast Pesca lists a number of glitches and goofs that will make the
poker aficianado wince. But this sort of nitpicking is a bit petty; as Pesca says, "If I was a munitions expert, I might say that, oh, a bomb would never explode like that."
Casino Royale isn't meant to be a
poker instructional video. It's a movie, and more than that, it's a
Bond movie, and so it's supposed to be over-the-top. If the clumsy
poker play bothers you so much that you can't properly enjoy the fights, the chases, and, oh my stars, Eva Green, then you really need to lighten up.
But. There's one aspect to the
poker that DID bother me, and no, I will NOT lighten up. Pesca didn't mention this in his podcast but I will here. We see Bond playing
poker on two separate occasions. Both times there comes a hand when he decides to go all-in. Each time he has a huge stack of chips and plaques in front of him
And when he goes all-in...he uses both hands to shovel his stack into the pot. Chips spill and splash all over the felt. It's appalling. There is no way, NO WAY, that James Bond would behave in such a sloppy, boorish manner. Even Daniel Craig's hard-edged Bond wouldn't allow himself to look that immature. He'd say "all-in" with a precise flick of his index finger and either let the dealer count down his stack or, more likely, he'd say, "It will cost you exactly $4.37 million to call". He'd be cool. He'd be suave. He'd be 007. He wouldn't make a mess of the pot and force the floorman and dealer to spend 20 minutes figuring out what the hell the proper count is.
That bugged me. It took nearly two full seconds of Eva Green on the screen to make me forget about it. But she did, and you shouldn't let that dissuade you from seeing the movie. It'll immediately be on your shortlist of the best Bond movies ever.
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