I also vividly remembered Bond grabbing a glass and salt shaker to make himself throw up after ingesting poison, because ever since, I’ve wondered if that would work. It wasn’t a movie I’d thought about much, but I knew that there was a poker game, that the villain’s “tell” was a bleeding eye, that the tell was false, that the dastardly plot involved sabotaging an airplane to manipulate the stock market (essentially recreating the airline stock crash that followed 9/11), and I remembered Eva Green looking gorgeous in her eggplant gown, and Craig licking her fingers in the shower (that one I might have seen GIFed on Tumblr-it’s one of the better sexy moments in film history). I was surprised how many specific plot elements and details I could recall. Recently, sitting down to revisit it for the first time in 15 years, I remembered thinking it was good, but more than that.

It would also be the first I’d see in theaters, having been too young for any of the Brosnan installments I saw advertised on bus stops and billboards. There was already a Casino Royale Bond movie, but now, this was a new one. I knew “license to kill” was a thing, and I read enough celebrity news to know Casino Royale was the rare remake. The Austin Powers es did a pretty good job familiarizing me with the tropes of the genre-incompetent henchmen, ridiculous gadgets, girls in skimpy outfits, villains with One Weird Trait-and I think I even knew that there were novels, though I didn’t know anyone who’d read them. I know I’d definitely seen Goldfinger, and while I didn’t at the time have the vocabulary to articulate what a character name like “Pussy Galore” meant (the nuances of backward-feminist camp are sometimes lost on children), I understood that this series was for adults, but that it wasn’t incredibly serious. My boomer dad liked a lot of the Sean Connery movies, and we’d sometimes watch them together. I was a tween when Casino Royale came out, but I was fairly familiar with Bond as a cultural institution. So, how does his first go-round as 007 hold up? In a word, just fine! In retrospect, Casino Royale is a fun action flick with stellar performances, best enjoyed with a dry martini and a smooth-brain-no-thoughts attitude. It’s been a decade and a half since Daniel Craig first hit the screen as James Bond, the role he’s just departed. Welcome to Rearview Mirror, a monthly movie column in which I re-view and then re-review a movie I have already seen under the new (and improved?) critical lens of 2021.

Casino royale poison scene