Casino Royale

An older James Bond comes out of retirement to defeat SMERSH.

Casino Royale’s strongest suit is it’s music courtesy of Burt Bacharach.

Unfortunately, with five directors, eleven writers, and an all-star cast, Casino Royale is a case of too many conflicting visions. David Niven and Peter Sellers are enjoyable, but the movie is wildly uneven.

Each director seems to have handled a different segment, but very little attention seems to have been payed to making them fit together. I also wonder if they were even using the same script, as characters are often introduced in one segment, only to disappear for the rest of the movie.

The frustrating thing about Casino Royale is that some sequences are really good. Under a single director and with a more polished script, a cast of this talent could have turned in excellent spoof of the Bond franchise, but instead we’re left with a mess.