The Movie Review: Casino Royale

If you love gaming and spy movies, then you must’ve watched 007, aka James Bond. It’s one of the highest-grossing film franchises globally, as well as in Finland. Based on a fictional character penned by Ian Fleming in 1953, its popularity keeps growing. Our expert in guest post topic, Maunu Seppinen, gives a gamer’s perspective on the franchise and the film Casino Royale.

Background

The protagonist in the series James Bond is a British secret service agent working for the MI6. He also goes by the code name ‘007’. He’s portrayed as a great gambler who’s quite comfortable in a casino environment. There have been several films from this franchise featuring 007 playing baccarat. If you feel like trying your luck, visit luotettavat nettikasinot in Finnish.

Casino Royale

The film Casino Royale 1967 is a spy comedy film by Columbia Pictures. To watch the Casino Royale trailer, click here.

Plot

The film starts with James Bond living in his English countryside mansion. He’s retired and no longer plans to work for the British Secret Service. However, he is implored by heads of the British, French, American and Russian Secret Services to return to work. They wanted him back as many of their spies were killed by the enemy SMERSH.

Bond declines the request, and his mansion is destroyed on the orders of M (Head of MI6), who gets killed in the process. Following these events, Bond returns to his work and is promoted as the head of MI6.

When he learns about the killings of the spies, he creates a plan where he names all the agents as “James Bond 007” to confuse SMERSH. He also recruits a baccarat expert Evelyn Tremble to beat Le Chiffre, a SMERSH agent.

When Tremble arrives with an accomplice Lynd at the Casino Royale, he observes that Le Chiffre had been cheating in the game using infrared sunglasses. Lynd then steals the glasses, and Tremble wins in the game. As a result, there’s a violent fallout between the three outside the casino, and Tremble is killed.

In the end, Sir James discovers that Lynd is a double agent and secret agents overrun the casino. James also finds that his nephew, Jimmy Bond has defected to SMERSH and has biological warfare plans. Finally, the Casino Royale is destroyed by Jimmy’s atomic pills, and they all die.

Cast

The main actors in the film are David Niven as Sir James Bond, Ursula Andress as Vesper Lynd, Peter Sellers as Evelyn Tremble, Joanna Pettet as Mata Bond, and Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond. Charles K. Feldman and Jerry Bresler were the producers of this spoof.

Casino Royale Rotten Tomatoes Review: This film has a rating of 26%

Is there a Casino Royale Netflix offering? This film is available on Netflix in some countries.

Baccarat

Bond plays the baccarat Chemin de Fer in various movies like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Dr No, Thunderball and Golden Eye. In the novel “Casino Royale,” Fleming has managed to make this game clear to most novice players. The game in the original book is played by Bond himself, where he eventually wins.

Chemin de Fer

This version of baccarat, also known as Shimmy, was developed in the late 19^th century. It uses six decks of cards and can be played by a maximum of 12 players. Shimmy is different from the traditional Italian baccarat as the players bet against each other, one at a time, instead of betting against the entire house. Every player takes a turn to act as the banker.

Like most casino games, Chemin de Fer is also largely dependent on luck. Below are some handy tips while playing online:

Always keep an eye on your fellow players, and if they draw or stand when their card total is five.
Keep your bets modest to be able to stay in the gamer longer.
Don’t concern yourself over betting against or with streaks. There’s no logic to it.
When playing other versions of baccarat, avoid the tie bet.
Finally, play steady and don’t try to recoup losses by wagering high amounts.

Conclusion

If you’re a gamer, then watching Bond films is the most entertaining and informative way to kill time. These action-packed flicks will teach you a thing or two you need to know about casino games.

Ross Miller

I'm a freelance film reviewer and blogger with over 10 years of experience writing for various different reputable online and print publications. In addition to my running, editing and writing for Thoughts On Film, I am also the film critic for The National, the newspaper that supports an independent Scotland, covering the weekly film releases, film festivals and film-related features. I have a passion for all types of cinema, and have a particular love for foreign language film, especially South Korean and Japanese cinema. Favourite films include The Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

After so many sequels and reboots of the Spider-Man character on the big-screen, from Sam Raimi’s trilogy to the character being integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s hard to see what else they can give us that’s going to surprise. But along comes an animated Spider-Man to do just that.

Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is a normal teenager living in New York with his parents; loving but fairly easy-going mother Rio (Luna Lauren) and loving but tough police officer father Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry) – the film has a surprising emotional through-line in how it depicts the father-son relationship.

One day while doing some secretive spray painting with his chummy uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), he is bitten by a mysterious spider that gives him special powers from web slinging to a tingling Spidey Sense.

This leads him to eventually crossing paths with Peter Parker (Jake Johnson) who, due to the villainous Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) meddling with a dimension-altering weapon, has inadvertently been sent over from a parallel universe and who eventually teaches Miles how to be Spider-Man.

But it doesn’t stop there;many other diverse versions appear, from Gwen Stacy AKA Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld) to Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage). Sony’s dazzling animation is as fun because it takes that idea and just runs with it.

Anyone can wear the mask seems to be its mantra, conjuring the everyman wonder that drives much of comic book fandom. For all its eye-popping, modern visual aesthetics, it has a refreshingly old-fashioned spirit. The old and the new meet in the film’s beguiling combination of traditional hand-drawn animation and contemporary bells and whistles computer rendering. It’s about as close as a film has come to feeling like a comic book come to life.

Inventive direction by trio Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman works in lovely harmony with the eclectic, knowing style of scriptwriter Phil Lord (The Lego Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) to find quite a miraculous way of breathing new life into the overflowing comic book genre.

From its sharply-written dialogue to its very animation style itself, the film is beautifully self-aware of its own station within the overall comic book movie catalogue, cleverly lampooning yet dotingly celebrating the attributes that have become such a part of pop culture. And yet it feels like it puts its own fiercely original stamp on that most famous of heroes.

This is a visually stunning, innovative incarnation of the character; propulsive in its energetic action, engagingly voiced, tightly written as a heroic narrative arc, reverential yet forward-thinking in its ethos and with a real sense of heart and soul at its core. It’s a particular treat for fans and a welcoming,imaginative embrace for everyone.

Few films in recent memory have demanded a big-screen as much as this high-fantasy adaptation. It compensates for a fairly generic hero story beating at its heart by giving us good mythologizing and just being the biggest one in the room.

Based on the 2001 young adult steampunk novel series by Philip Reeve, events takes place hundreds of years in the future. Humanity has all but completely fallen thanks to something called the Sixty Minute War, wherein a series of quantum bombs were set off that left the world a wasteland where resources are scarce.

In order to survive and assert dominance, humankind came up with the idea of making the world’s great cities into mobile machines that traverse the land in perpetual war with one another. The larger cities “absorb” smaller surrounding communities whose on-board societies live hearing stories of, and scavenging old tech (iPhones, computers, toasters) from, a time gone by.

Our hero is an enigmatic young woman named Hester (Hera Hilmar) with a scar on her face who boards the almighty London to exact revenge against leader Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), whom she blames for the death of her mother. There she meets wide-eyed Tom (Robert Sheehan) who, after they are forced out into the wilderness, band together in a larger fight.

The idea of mechanised cities roaming the earth is a bold concept indeed, one that that takes sometime to convince. But it gets there after an iffy warm-up act thanks to a nice,tangible sense of world-building (despite its CGI-heavy aesthetic) and an eye-popping epic scale.

The film’s greatest strength is the sheer size of it; these humungous mechanical cities with ever-moving parts and on ground-shaking wheels are a sight to behold. It’s a spectacle that does a lot of the heavy-lifting, so to speak, as the quest that propels the story forward leans on the familiar and doesn’t have a great deal of chemistry to speak of between the two leads; Sheehan has a fairly thankless, put-upon role compared to Hilmar’s more action-packed one.

Directed by first-timer Christian Rivers – a former storyboard artist talent nurtured by the film’s long-time developing producer/co-writer Peter Jackson – it also solidly works on its own terms as an escapist yarn propped up by an imaginative and intriguing mythology that feels lived-in and “believable” as far as these things go.

It has flaws to spare, not least an over reliance on a pedestrian hero arc bolted onto a quite standard adventure story. But it’s fairly rewarding in its sense of immersion in a well-designed world and a sense of towering scale that reminds us why the big-screen is referred to as such.

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