There's a new man in town: he's smooth, slick, sly and armed with unbendable Brit intelligence and charm. His name is not James Bond. He is Daniel Craig, and well, he does not disappoint.

Ever since the casting of Craig as the uber-spy "Double-O Seven", many eyebrows were raised like wings including me. For one thought, Craig would have been too brutish, too underweight, too blonde to become the 007 that at once, rather gaudily, I expected him to utter "My name's Blonde. James Blonde." But right after watching the flick, I came out surprised and ultimately pleased with the new Bond. Seems that the addage "expect the unexpected" was fit for the experience.

Casino Royale may be short out of the yowzah kind of action flick, explosions, wham-bam adventures and sky-rocketing, world-concerning doomsday spectacle you'd expect for a Bond film, it is so far the best Bond film I've ever seen (forgive me but I haven't seen so much Bond films and not so much of a fan about it), focusing more on grit, spunk and raw development of the spy's character on early missions instead of squandering around with some useless big-budgeted gadgets. And yes, Daniel Craig brings ultimate freshness to the role, giving the face of Bond a gritty look yet undeniably plausible in so many ways. Thanks to Royale for saving the franchise's almost vanishing trace of existence since Pierce Brosnan's escapades.

Casino Royale has its own fair share of the Bond scenarios, the mission, the gadgets, the cars, the women, the chases, and all those adventures that has got to with his license to kill. And since Royale had its gems towards the earlier days of Bond, and specifically adapted from Ian Fleming's first Bond novel and the first 1950 film, the writers had transformed the retro vision into the modern mission in which Bond had first got himself into after garnering his license to kill status in the MI6 agency. The film starts in black and white, a conceivable option to show us into the beginning, and cut through a full-range color into the world Bond was about to face. Yet he's not the perfect ultra-smooth we expected in a Bond, he commits mistakes and even impressed spymaster M (played with a despotic yet marvelous performance by Dame Judi Dench) as well as infuriate her for Bond's own arrogance and stubbornness. Then he was assigned to Montenegro to play poker against Le Chiffre, a banker for a secret global terrorist group, in the world renowned Casino Royale. There he would use his wits and definitive skills to stop Le Chiffre from winning with the help of the Treasury representative, Vesper Lynd. The two of them, as they try to hurtle against the lethal mission, would learn about treachery, loyalty and trust that they would soon find helpful in the adventures to come.

The action scenes here are very well-choreographed and cleverly-plotted especially the construction site and tower chase scene and all those terrific chases in the film.

And speaking of chases, Craig looks very fit using his own stunts and used his wide range of capabilities in maximum use in this film. He looks smooth, suave, yet at the same time brutally raw, commanding, stubborn yet lethal in ways you could possibly imagine. In fact, Craig's performance in Royale is probably the strongest, the best, the most drilled undertaking since Sean Connery, and if compared to Brosnan, the latter would somehow appear to be girlish in the seemingly untamed hands of Craig. And the torture scene near the end would have to be the most harrowing scene of all Bond films, stripping Bond naked in a chair and being tortured and whipped.

However, about the women, they play a huge part on Bond films, and Eva Green playing as Vesper Lynd was simply magnificent. She's not your ordinary Bond girl, and she's everything that Bond girls are not. She's ultimately smart, cunning, professionaly dressed (she does not show off right away in bikinis) yet remaining very sexy, and does not have sex with Bond as a way of a greeting. She even handles scenes with Craig very well, just as Bond is indomitably cheeky, Lynd is sarcastic and sharp-tounged, perfectly collaborating with each other.

Casino Royale also plunges into Bond's very first love affair, and of course, it was a love story. We see Bond as strong yet very vulnerable when it comes to the heart, and immediately learns that trust is a difficult thing to deal to others, which would explain to us why he's a cold-hearted bastard in many Bond films. But here, as Vesper Lynd spits it "cold-hearted bastard", he was deeply and emotionally attached to Lynd that he finds it difficult to deal with his missions and put his place in a crossroad between choosing to become a spy and a man who would fulfill his own personal life. Yet everything is doomed, and Craig puts a different Bond that we usually see. Here is a Bond that has a heart.

He maybe a Bond that doesn't care whether his martinis are shaken or stirred, but surely, this new Bond film would leave you stirred, thrilled and gradually entertained all through out. If the writing would stay consistent, Daniel Craig would likely stay and become a brilliant Bond in the years to come.

Rating: A-