A dose of reality for James Bond

Just go see "Casino Royale."

It seems real.

It's not just a teenage boy's fantasy of beautiful women and submarine cars or flying snowmobiles. It's not a movie about men too perfect fighting dwarf gazillionaires that want to blow up the moon so they can corner the market for green cheese.

It is not a movie of gimmicks that could transform any 16- to 60-year-old into an international spy who gets to do ANYTHING he wants to ANYBODY.

The new James Bond movie seems real. And it's a really good movie.

Good-bye, Roger Moore. Peirce Brosnan. Timothy what's his name. All of those who cashed in on the echo of Sean Connery. This new movie is not like any of the James Bond franchise, not even the Connery era, which had become clichés of themselves and far too easy toward the end.

It is more like the "Bourne Identity" films, maybe better.

The lead female doesn't even have perfect teeth.

It's a really good movie.

Right from the opening, before the credits, where we learn Bond began life as a "Double 0" by drowning one man in a bathroom sink and coldly shooting another in the brain, you know this is not going to be like any of the other 20 James Bond movies.

The next scene, of Bond chasing a man through a construction zone in a tropical city, is as amazing for its athletics as any of the earlier Bond movies were for their gimmicks.

This makes it different. Not one male in the audience is thinking, "Gosh, if I had that watch/gun/plane/car and 'Q' working for me, I could do that!" Nope. We were never Sean Connery, either, but this film leaves even fewer illusions.

No steamy sex. The women are not bimbos or ornaments. They are beautiful where they should be, of course, but it is a real beauty, with imperfect teeth or too much nose, a mouth too wide, beauty that shows character and strength, thank you Eva Green, not some plasticized Barbie of a woman who can't act nor even get out of the way of her own manufactured cleavage (good-bye, Denise Richards).

You have to be grateful that Judi Dench again got to play "M" in this film that feels so real, showing she really deserved more than she received in the previous versions, where people said, "I really like Judi Dench" because they had to, without knowing what she could add to a very good film. Which she does here.

There was such uproar when Daniel Craig was picked to play James Bond. Bond by a blond?!? Not good looking enough. Not smooth enough.

Ahhh, what a relief he is in this role; he does such a good job, it feels like taking off a pair of too-tight shoes.

Mr. Craig works very well in this real movie, not too clever with sexual innuendo or lines impossibly glib; he doesn't care how his martinis are poured, nor does he wear a Rolex. He is not a man who cares about such things.

Craig is just right for this movie, and just right when chastised by "M" at the end of the film when he begins to slide into bitterness, just right when he introduces himself at the very end as "Bond, James Bond," and he caps the villain who set him back on course of a "Double 0" career.

Perhaps Craig would not attract the attention of everyone at a five star hotel by his looks alone, but he would by his athleticism, by his intensity, by his purpose. There is a sense of danger about the man as he walks to the front desk. It is not put-on cleverness that gets attention; it is a presence that is present, an intensity that does not waver.

Even the torture scene is real. Compared to all the other Bond movies, where a Bond may have been tied to a rocket or about to be ground into sausage by micro robots, there is nothing fanciful about the scene with Bond locked into the hold of the ship with the bad guy.

It is a simple torture, very real, and will have most men looking warily at woven-cane chairs for quite some time.

Bond didn't even get the pleasure of killing the villain.

Add to the pleasure of a really good movie the fact that you can see it right here in Sisters, at our own movie house and without all of the captured feeling you get at Regal.

That makes "Casino Royale" a very entertaining evening.