WHO would have thought that the casting of a blond Bond would stir up such a hornet’s nest of controversy? Daniel Craig has been the subject of fevered speculation and a good few personal attacks since he signed on as the sixth Bond, and even now there are threats of boycotts in some sectors of the online community.

But despite the antipathy to the idea of Craig as Bond, it’s all good news for EON productions. Although the previous instalment was drubbed by critics and audiences alike, the fans still care enough about the Bond series to get angry.

While Die Another Day was a box-office draw, in it Bond was in danger of losing something equally valuable to the franchise in the long term: his cool. It was the invisible car that did it. That, and a blanket of special effects that could smother the life out of the best of screenplays — and let’s face it, Die Another Day was not the best of screenplays.

In The Bourne Identity’s Jason Bourne and 24’s Jack Bauer, special agents who share Bond’s initials but little else, the lumbering, longrunning franchise met its match. That much-derided vanishing Aston Martin in Bond’s 20th official outing sealed the fate of 007 as we had come to know him.

With Bond No 21, in what the producers are describing as a “reboot” of the franchise, Casino Royale takes us back to basics: to Bond’s early years as a newly appointed 00; to a leaner, lower-budget production and to a Bond who looks like he can do some serious damage, rather than just smarm his way out of a tight spot and disappear on a mini-nuclear submarine disguised as a Biro.

For this picture, which lists Paul Haggis, who wrote Crash, as one of its screenwriters, the action is less reliant on the sillier gadgets favoured in the Brosnan era (although fortunately Bond does have a portable defibrillator in his car). Instead the film stakes its reputation on one formidable weapon — Daniel Craig’s ruthless, reckless Bond.

Every decade gets the Bond it deserves and we are living in some pretty scary times. Craig is up there with the best: he combines Sean Connery’s athleticism and cocksure swagger with Timothy Dalton’s thrilling undercurrent of stone-cold cruelty. While the rather foppish Pierce Brosnan had the bland chiselled looks of a male catalogue model, Craig’s face is endlessly fascinating. It’s brutishly ugly — he looks like he’d stab you in the eye if you crossed him, and would probably enjoy doing it. But his sex appeal is off the scale. He even makes his first assassination (shown in grainy black and white) an unsettlingly erotic experience. His Bond bleeds, bruises, makes fatal mistakes.

The chemistry between Craig and his co-star and love interest Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) is explosive. The relationship is founded on prickly admiration, but it’s when they both peel away their defences that things get interesting. A scene where Bond comforts a traumatised Vesper in the shower by gently sucking her fingers is impossibly sexy.

Vesper is the treasury accountant who is bankrolling Bond’s mission to break the bank at a high-stakes poker game in Montenegro. The target is Le Chiffre (Danish star Mads Mikkelsen), an international money launderer with a Hitler haircut, a platinum asthma inhaler and a tendency to bleed from the eye. They might as well have just tattooed the word Evil on his head.

In this new, edgy Bond, the stunts are more physical and the violence raw. An early chase sequence appropriates the free running techniques popularised in Paris to impressive, if ludicrous, effect. And there’s a genuinely horrible torture sequence where Bond suffers some unpleasant genital trauma.

Craig has an impressive physique (generously displayed) that makes him a far more plausible Bond than many of his predecessors. But his main asset quickly becomes evident. He can act.

Released nationwide from November 16