Not that I’m a big fan of Sony but you can see James Bond using a Sony Vaio a few times in the movie Casino Royale. In most movies you see the actors using an Apple Macintosh. I think that’s because it’s good product placement for Apple, whose products are distinct. You can’t help but notice the big fraking Apple logo on their laptops. Whereas most Windows laptops are too nondescript to be discerned from one another.

I really wish Dell had put an XPS in his hands but at least we can say that Bond doesn’t use no stinkin’ Mac!

I don’t want to go overboard with this and I know that OS X, or whatever they’re up to now, is a damn good operating system but there’s a stereotype that “real men don’t use Macs.” I think that’s the main reason they didn’t do a product placement for Apple. It’s just the attitude, no matter how inaccurate, that you use a Mac to look at pictures, surf the web, email, that sort of thing. You use a PC when the fate of the world is at stake.

Note: this is a spoiler free review.

When I first heard news, about a year ago, of the new Bond film I thought, “Yeah, whatever.” There hadn’t been a good Bond film in what . . . 2, 3 decades? There had been a few decent ones but nothing that really stood out. So I wasn’t exactly marking my calendar for the release date.

About a week or so ago I checked RottenTomatoes.com to see what sort of reviews it was getting. And guess what? It was rated over 90% But, there had only been a handful of reviews. So, again, I didn’t get my hopes up, but it took some effort. Then again, a few days ago I checked and it was at 96% with over a hundred reviews counted. Are you kidding me? If you had told me, hell, if you had told anyone, that a Bond film would ever get over 90% at RottenTomatoes you would have been laughed at. That’s more unbelievable than the stupefying stunts that Bond pulls off in the movies.

Yet here I sit, having just watched the best Bond film I’ve ever seen.

Everyone knows that Bond is going to do the unbelievable at least a hand full of times in a movie. The trouble is many of the actors - all of them since Connery - didn’t sell it. Bond would come back from the brink of death leaving the audience on the brink of disbelief. I often felt that it was cute but I wasn’t buying it.

Daniel Craig sells it and the script gives him something to sell. In one of the first chase scenes we see a man make an amazing jump through a small opening in a wall of drywall. Craig bashes right through it. This Bond isn’t cute. He isn’t suave. And he doesn’t use neat gadgets to save himself. But he is believable.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s fair to judge this Bond film with the great Bond films that are over 20 years old. I think it’s better to compare it to what many think is the successor to Bond, Bourne. In that light I’d say that Casino is almost as good as the original, Bourne Identity. And it’s better than Bourne Supremacy.