The Treasury official accompanying Bond to the casino and fronting up zillions of pounds of taxpayer's cash is the slinky Miss Vesper Lynd, played by Eva Green, who speaks English in a residual French accent that makes her sound permanently sarky. Le Chiffre is played by Mads Mikkelsen, in which role he has the privilege of following Orson Welles from the 1967 spoof version. The supremely silly idea is that Bond, that über-amateur card-player, will relieve Le Chiffre of all his money - and thus, the terrorists of all their resources - at a single high-rollers' card game, although the game is not chemin de fer, but a rather more déclassé one of poker. M even implies that manipulating airline stock prices was a motivating factor for 9/11 - a sly piece of cynicism that would have amused Fleming himself.

His spurs earned, Bond must now tackle his first super-villain: Le Chiffre, banker to Smersh in the original, now accountant and financier to international terrorists everywhere, though al-Qaida and anyone else from the Middle East are coyly left unmentioned. After a very nasty and violent killing in a men's room, shot in grainy monochrome, Bond earns his official double-0 rating with a second wet job: the unofficial whacking of a traitor in the higher reaches of MI6. This is the story of James Bond's beginning, transferred forward in time to a loosely imagined post-9/11 present.

The key to his X-factor is that Craig looks as if he would be equally at home playing a Bond villain. With Craig's unsmiling demeanour and his unfashionably, even faintly un-British dirty blond hair, he looks like a cross between the Robert Shaw who grappled with Bond in From Russia With Love and Patrick McGoohan's defiant Prisoner. He's easily the best Bond since Sean Connery, and perhaps even - well, let's not get carried away. He has effortless presence and lethal danger he brings a serious actor's ability to a fundamentally unserious part he brings out the playfulness and the absurdity, yet never sends it up. Daniel Craig is a fantastic Bond, and all those whingers and nay-sayers out there in the blogosphere should hang their heads in shame.Ĭraig was inspired casting. Now he has taken on the mantle of 007, and the result is a death-defying, sportscar-driving, female-back-fondling, cocktail-recipe-specifying triumph.

But that's enough about his performance as Ted Hughes. On the big screen, Daniel Craig has shown himself fully capable of taking on a British icon: a man of cool, cruel determination, mesmerising sex appeal and a fatally destructive way with women.

Was vesper a traitor in casino royale