(WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS.)

Yes, it was a bit too long. Shaving off 15 minutes here and there would probably have made the movie near-perfect. The scenes with James falling in love with accountant Vesper Lynd almost choreographed the story -- you knew she must have some ulterior motives because he was becoming so attached to her. Likewise, the poker scenes dragged a bit at times. Still, give points to director Martin Campbell for making them as suspensful as they were. I did, however, think it would be hilarious if someone managed a hand of 9 kings, the best hand in all of poker.

That said, everything else about the movie was spot-on. In fact, it kicked ass. The opening 5 minutes was one of the best pre-credits sequences I've ever seen, and the clever play on the walk across a gun barrel, turn and fire trope was magnificent. In fact, It did a nice job of subverting genre tropes without overthrowing them entirely, and nothing was vastly over-the-top like pretty much all of Pierce Brosnan's last Bond movie was.

In almost every way the reason that movie, "Die Another Day," failed so badly is because it was so out of touch with the world we live in. Here we were, a year removed from the collapse of the World Trade Center and the best the filmmakers could manage was a villain in Switzerland with a Nintendo Power Glove controlling a giant laser from space. It was a cartoon. And if the Cold War relic of Bond had become somewhat outdated in the 1990s, by the 2000s he was all but a fossil.

I didn't live through much of the Cold War. And because of that, I tended to view James Bond as almost something of an historical artifact for most of my life, a throwback to a time in which Soviets were the bad guys and Fort Knox was the be-all-and-end-all of international crime.

"Casino Royale" has finally brought James Bond into the 21st century -- and not in the way that previous filmmakers seemed to want to do it, which is to say with gadgetry and world-dominating villains. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

Imagine the irony then that an adaptation of Ian Fleming's first novel could make Bond a hero for this century and cast him as a force not against communism but instead international terrorism. One only need watch the torture scene in which this film's villain, Le Chiffre, uses a simple rope -- not a laser or a tank of sharks but a rope -- to threaten Bond. The response is not only more visceral but more chilling. This is no fantasy, this is a realistic, human situation.

No, Bond doesn't (and hopefully won't) fight Arabs in turbans, but he does fight a ruthless and brutal terrorist financier, one who uses the threat of hurting individuals rather than world domination, as well as African terrorists/freedom fighters (they are referred to with both terms, and knowingly so by the writers) one of whom refuses to yield through an amazing first act chase scene. And as such Bond must match that brutality, not with a wink, but with jaws clenched, as he raids an embassy and coldly executes the guy before destroying part of the compound.

For the first time I can think of, this movie reminded me that James Bond kills people. That's his job. Previously when Bond killed his enemies the quippy line after it would deplete it of any gravity. This movie doesn't have any of that. Watch the opening credits -- these are the first I can recall that featured not lithe silouhettes of women or complex images of guns (though there were some of those) but rather hand-to-hand fighting. (Which, I will say, does not detract from the fact that Eva Green, who plays Vesper, is fly. Because, damn, she fly.)

That opening credits sequence shows how this movie succeeded. In order to bring James Bond forward and make him relevant, we had to strip him of all that futuristic, gadgety claptrap and have him get his hands dirty.

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