Spotlight Blog: Casino Royale

In the second edition of our spotlight blog series, we will be looking, at the first of Daniel Craig’s outings as the world’s most recognisable secret agent James Bond, Casino Royale.

We will give a quick summation of the plot, thoughts on the film on the whole and talk through any iconic or standout scenes while trying our best to avoid as many spoilers as possible. (it is a 14-year-old movie at this point so, there may be one or two spoilers).

Casino Royale plot (minus spoilers we promise)

As we said this was Craig’s first rendition of the iconic character and this film is fittingly all about Bond in his opening days of 00 status for MI6.

Bond starts the movie in high octane fashion with an on-foot chase with bomb-maker Mollaka in Madagascar. Let’s just say the scene ends how you would expect it to but let us just say it is an explosive start to the movie. At the end of the scene, He searches through Mollaka’s backpack only to find a bomb and a cell phone with a text message that read: ELLIPSIS. Bond goes to the Bahamas and finds a man named Dimitrios, who is the accomplice of the main villain of the film, who he murders by blowing him up in a Skyfleet place which sets in motion the main plot of Casino Royale.

The main plot point of this movie is that the terrorist organisation’s chief accountant, Le Chiffre lost lots of money due to Bond’s antics. To try and recoup his losses Le Chiffre joins a high stakes poker game at the Casino Royale in Montenegro. Obviously, MI6 would not let this go, so they send Bond to make sure Le Chiffre comes away empty-handed.

Bond initially gains the upper hand in this poker game by figuring out what Le Chiffre’s tell is. After Le Chiffre learns that Bond knows this tell, which turns the tables quite literally and Bond goes bust. Bond then decides to go after Le Chiffre and murder him but is stopped by CIA agent Felix Leiter, and it is Leiter who gives Bond some more money to play.

Bond’s day goes from bad to worse, as after he can get his footing back in the Texas Hold em’, his signature martini drink gets poisoned. He is rescued thanks to a defibrillator in his Aston Martin DBS V12, and he returns for the final hand…..

Following the conclusion of the game Bond’s partner, Vesper Lynd is captured by Le Chiffre and is used as bait for Bond. After further torture to Lynd and Bond, especially to Bond’s boys, the pair getaway and Bond intends on leaving MI6 and pens a resignation letter to M. That’s where you think it ends. Still, there is one final action sequence which we won’t spoil, but as you may know, this was just the beginning for Bond, James Bond.

Poker play and some long odds

Now that we have looked at what the film is about, we bring it back to the theme of our spotlight, the casino and Poker. Apart from the inaccuracy that there is not one physical casino on Earth that would offer the prize pool that is on offer in Casino Royale. Still, there are a couple of other inaccuracies that have been done for the action of the movie rather than just being movie mistakes. The other big mistake is that the final set of cards would not happen in a real game of Texas Hold Em. The guys around the table have hands that you would get in less than 3% of hands going down to Bond, who has a hand which has a probability of under 0.1%. So that makes the fact the four of them get these hands all in the same round is as unlikely as it was when Leicester City won the Premier League in 2016.

This all was done to make the scene more entertaining for the audience rather than messing with the mind of poker aficionados.

Check out our first spotlight blog all about Fallout New Vegas