A lot of people in show business are called the masters of marketing: Madonna, Steven Spielberg, Harvey Weinstein. But they’re all bested by the Broccoli family, which has produced all of the James Bond movies beginning with 1962’s Dr. No, the longest-running and most successful series of B-movies ever. Albert R. Broccoli, and his daughter Barbara after him, learned that a strict collection of genre tropes could be pitched and re-pitched to any generation with a little tweaking—and directors absolutely do not matter.

There’s something repulsively hip about the James Bond films. To keep the series alive, each new Bond flatters the audience’s fashion sense: From Bond’s obsessive search for the perfect martini—shaken, not stirred—to the exotic, villainous (and vaguely lesbian) beauty of Grace Jones in A View to a Kill, the movies represent our basest urge to find “what’s hot,” even when what’s being offered invariably comes down to blonde beach beauties and big, black pistols.

This is why James Bond is at once trashy and elitist: He appeals not only to our primal urge to fuck and kill but also to our materialistic taste for caviar and champagne. It’s no wonder one critic sums up the series as “a cornerstone of the immoral cinema.”

Some people forget how gruesome the movies can be—anyone remember Felix in License to Kill having his legs fed to a shark while his wife is raped and murdered?—because the Broccolis are careful never to attach any morality to their quip-happy formula. Audiences who would normally shudder at much more honest violence in, say, Munich find ways to justify the cynical pleasures of a Bond experience. Death is more palatable as a punchline.

Given how dull and depressing the Bond franchise generally is, Casino Royale is about as close as it will ever come to hope. This one is energetic and creative, lighthearted and yet deadly serious. The producers must’ve sensed that even America at large was becoming jaded by the standard Bond in Die Another Day, because Casino Royale has all the trappings of a character rebirth: It’s a present-day update of the original 007 book, and it ends with this mysterious note to viewers after all the credits have rolled: “James Bond will return.”

The note seems like two things: a promise of another sequel as well as an act of defiance. Barbara Broccoli, like her father, is determined to resell James for a new, postmodern audience—and make sure he always earns lots of money. Here Bond (Daniel Craig) plays around with his own trademarks, ditches some and takes some to the extreme. Luckily, “Q” is gone, and the product placement isn’t nearly as garish as the electric razor or newly Ford-owned Aston Martin in Die Another Day. Bond can finally let loose, and when he’s under pressure, he can even ignore how his martini is made.

Judi Dench as “M” reminds Bond in one scene, “Self-awareness and arrogance don’t usually go hand-in-hand.” Casino Royale is highly aware of itself, and not at all deluded about its job as pure popcorn entertainment.

But it realizes that, by this point, Bond’s dubious destructive streak—his “license to kill”—deserves attention it has never really gotten. This Bond is angrier than all the others, a “bad man” who lashes against other bad men as a form of emotional resistance. A woman betrays him and she is simply “that bitch.” At turns he may be the least likeable Bond, but the point is that he comes from a real place.

A lot of it is thanks to Daniel Craig, whose icy blue eyes convey an intensity that immediately stands apart from the playful cheekiness of all the past Bonds. He loses his cool in a poker game of all things, something Pierce Brosnan never dreamed of, and ploughs ahead into his mission with the same feverish force of director Martin Campbell’s ever-gliding camera.

Just as Bond is trying to settle into relaxation at the end of the film, he is forced back into retribution mode by more betrayal. He keeps learning—“Trust no one”—but he keeps getting hurt.

This isn’t cheap, extraneous character development; Craig is the first Bond to feel really human. He’s a killing, fucking machine, but he has a shred of compassion that won’t ever die. Perhaps now the same can be said about his producers.