And I thought the first two Bourne movies had plenty of soul (though I’ll give you the third one – a real disappointment).

(Mind you, I thought Bond displayed quite a bit of emotion and inner turmoil in Royale, albeit veiled just beneath the surface.)

The best analysis of Bond I ever read, focusing on Casino Royale (courtesy of Dave’s Long Box), runs like this:

“Fleming’s James Bond is more conflicted and prone to self-doubt than his superhuman cinema counterpart. He’s a Cold War civil servant who has developed expensive tastes and bad habits, a hollow killer who immerses himself in sensual pleasures to distract himself from his inevitable violent fate. He drinks way too much, smokes too much, eats unhealthy gourmet cuisine, and pops the occasional pill to kill the pain or perk himself up. James Bond is not going to grow old, he’s going to die with a 9mm bullet in his lung or a knife between his ribs and he knows it. [...] Above all, Fleming’s books are about James Bond, the character.

This brings us to Casino Royale and how much it kicked ass.

Have you seen this movie? I don’t know if I’ve just been starving for a proper Bond film and it has skewed my critical faculties, but holy crap, I loved it. From beginning to end, Casino Royale was Bondian.

Daniel Craig captures the manly essence of a James Bond at the beginning of his career. He’s a callous, over-confident killer with a bit of an attitude who has developed some unhealthy coping skills to deal with the realities of his work. Unlike some previous Bonds, you really feel like this guy could die, that at some point he will die. He’s not ridiculously competent at everything he does, just most things. And he can run hella fast. We’re talking Robert Patrick-fast.

The thing I liked most about Casino Royale was that it treated James Bond as a character. He doesn’t just float through the movie, untouchable. Bond has an emotional investment in the events of the movie and has a definite character arc – he has changed from the beginning of the film to the end. He sincerely, deeply falls in love with Vesper (Eva Green) despite the raccoon eye make-up she wears all the time that makes her look like Darryl Hannah in Blade Runner.”