How can we identify with someone who seemingly can’t be hurt - and why should we worry about him? He even [SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!] survives a poison-induced heart attack that would have put an ordinary human into a hospital for a week. He not only survives, but is back playing high-stakes poker in an hour’s time, looking very little the worse for wear.

With the previous Bonds, their cartoon-like ability to bounce back, Lazarus-like, from situation after situation was made at least partly contextual by the slightly sci-fi universe that both Bond and his ever-more-grandiose villains inhabited. The increasingly elaborate gadgets that Q supplied to Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan helped set this tone.

While Craig has a fairly cool cell phone/tracking device, as well as that handy-dandy portable defibrillator that shocks him back to life after the heart attack, the gizmos in Casino Royale are kept to a minimum. Craig’s Bond is Superman without the redeeming element of kryptonite and Batman without the elaborate crime-fighting tools - just your average un-killable spy. Again, why should we care about him?

Another miscalculation in Casino Royale is central to the story: Bond’s showdown with Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), who has unwisely lost hundreds of millions of terrorist dollars playing the stock market and must win it back at the gaming tables before the bad guys kill him. This plot is lifted almost directly from Fleming’s Cold War-era novel of the same name, with today’s all-purpose evil, international terrorism standing in for Fleming’s bogeyman of Soviet Russia. In the book, Bond faces off with Le Chiffre at the baccarat table, but the filmmakers have updated this to Texas Hold ‘Em no-limit poker, familiar to anyone who, like me, has become addicted to Celebrity Poker Showdown.

The cinematic problem with Texas Hold ‘Em, which gives each player two face-down cards and then lets each one make the best hand they can from five common cards that are revealed one at a time, is that unless the audience knows what cards each player holds, and therefore knows whether a player is bluffing, winning or simply miscalculating, there’s no real suspense. I mean Alfred Hitchcock’s kind of suspense as opposed to simple surprise.

If, for example, the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table that will go off in five minutes, everything that keeps the film’s characters in the soon-to-explode room is a source of agony for the audience. However, if the audience is as ignorant as the characters, all they get is the surprise of a “boom” when the bomb goes off — a few seconds of shock versus minutes of involved suspense. [SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!] We get a surprise when Bond finally defeats Le Chiffre, but because we don’t know what the players’ hole cards are, we are denied the pleasures of suspense.