Casino Royale

Job done, the bitch is dead. And the Bond franchise is alive and well. This is not only the best Bond movie for many years, it’s also the best action thriller I’ve seen in a very long time.

I have to admit that I was one of the naysayers. Craig was just awful in Enduring Love, but not only does he make the part seem real, he convinces us that that is how we always wanted it.

The really inspired casting however was Eva Green. A good deal of Craig’s roughness would have gone to waste without her smooth. We shall have to see how the new Bond fares when the love interest is well, less interesting.

Paul Haggis of Crash had a hand in a superb script, which presents itself with so many opportunities to trip over clichés only to dodge them as 007 dodges bullets. And poker game aside, I felt like I knew what was going on most of the time too.

David Arnold's score echoes some of the great Bond soundtracks of yesteryear, and unlike many, I thought the title song and credits were great too.

I can see why some might think that the baddies are little ill-defined in this film, but when you have the likes of Abu Hamza as the modern posterboys of international terrorism, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to focus on the bean-counters. Every organization has them and they are usually more nefarious, in a dull sort of way, than the high-profile leaders.

There was quite a troupe of under-8s in the cinema this morning. I remember not being allowed to see The Man with the Golden Gun in the cinema when it was released because of the violence (and snogging), but this refreshed, hard-edged sort of Bond film is far more adult in almost every sense − perhaps not the kind of movie to recruit a new generation of pre-teen fans?

That classic Aston Martin from the Bahamas scenes was parked at the rear of the Savoy a couple of weeks ago. It had 007 plates. As I walked past it the doorman came out of the hotel in a rush to make sure I wasn't about to run my keys down the side of it. It must have been his biggest responsibility of the day, and he had temporarily taken his eye off the ball. In one of the most-character defining moments of the movie Craig's swinish Bond causes willful criminal damage to a fellow guest's Range Rover outside their hotel on Paradise Island. It's ok, the owner was German.