Released at a time when the franchise had been overtaken in spectacle by Bourne and Mission: Impossible, Martin Campbell’s second slightly-harder Bond reboot wisely eschews a central action sequence in favour of an intimate and wonderfully tense extended poker game. It’s a brilliant sequence, all the more so for never wasting time spelling out the rules of Texas hold ‘em for the audience and trusting that, even if they don’t know a flush from a straight, the acting and direction will communicate the tension. The action sequences are good (especially free-running in Madagascar) but that central section makes the film.
Eva Green is so good in this and has such incredible chemistry with Daniel Craig that it’s a genuine shame she couldn’t continue playing Vesper in future films and it’s easy to see why her character’s death reverberates through Craig’s entire tenure as Bond.