2. Casino Royale: A Swiss Man
Casino Royale rebooted the franchise, stripping it to its bare bones, but in one very important way it keeps continuity with its predecessors. It has an embarrassingly out of place comic relief character. By now, you should be aware of a pattern. If a Bond movie is stupid, it'll probably have an incongruously serious bit in it. If a Bond movie is serious, most likely it'll have one heroically misjudged comic aside. Casino Royale has Mendel, a Swiss banker who waddles into the film during the centrepiece Texas Hold 'Em sequence. There's something kind of daft about him- the actor Ludger Pistor is a funny looking chap- but it's not until later in the film that he really 'comes into his own'. As Bond recovers from a terrible case of ball-ache, he admits to Vesper that he might be falling in love with her. It's an emotional moment, and probably the first scene since On Her Majesty's Secret Service where Bond has looked properly vulnerable. And apparently, it's the perfect time to reintroduce Mendel, with his comically clipped English and a token reference to chocolates (he is a man from Switzerland, you see). We haven't seen stereotyping of this quality since the drunk French taxi driver in A View to a Kill. Compared to that, Mendel is a pleasingly subtle character, but his sudden reappearance, like a latter-day Porlock, spoils the flow of the moment. It's a rare slip-up in a film that is otherwise tonally spot-on. Eva Green's face says it all.