WHO can recall such ballyhoo over the arrival of a new Bond film? It's been a while, but the common question . . . is Daniel Craig the best ever Bond? . . . is a bit daft.

After all, we all know who the best Bond is. But to ask that question is also to forget how fresh and mesmerising Bond must have seemed when he bared his chest to audiences in Dr No in 1962.

And almost 45 years later and post 9-11, it is more appropriate to ask if Daniel Craig is the best 007 we could have in the tuxedo right now. After the flabby Die Another Day, the answer is yes . . . with an emphatic bullet to the temple. Boy is Craig up to the job. He dispatches the old lipstick on the collar, not-a-hair-out-of-place Bond with a swift handchop to the cervical vertebrae. And when a barman asks if a vodka martini should be shaken not stirred, he snaps at him: "Do I look like I give a damn?" The new Bond is a cocktail of granite masculinity, matter-of-fact brutality with a dash of masochism. The Daniel Craig naysayers must be choking on their martinis.

Ian Fleming wrote that he imagined Bond as a character whom "exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure . . . an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a government". This Bond is closer to the mark. Where Pierce Brosnan would have fixed his tie after unleashing carnage upon some hapless goons, Daniel Craig's unselfconscious Bond wears a reptilian sneer with eyes like a shark . . . a clinical killing machine. But he is also sensitive.

When Judi Dench's disapproving and maternal M tells him: "I would ask you if you could remain emotionally detached but I don't think that's your problem Bond, " she can't foresee how Eva Green's luscious Bond girl, Vesper Lynd, will melt his heart but also leave him even chillier than ever.

Casino Royale, like the recent Batman Begins, taps into the trend of giving our old heroes more psychological depth by going back to their formative years . . . a character-building exercise cloaked in a thriller. The scriptwriters, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, have gone back to Fleming's first Bond book and given it a distinctly realist bite . . .

Craig really does look hurt . . . while the psychologically rich material bears the fingerprints of Oscarwinning screenwriter Paul Haggis.

When Bond has to earn his 007 status by two assassinations, the first one is a botched job in a men's shower room. Killing is seen as an unglamorous, messy business.

Bond, on his first job as 007, is on the trail of villain Le Chiffre (Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen), an asthmatic international banker whose weak spot is a Blofeld-like scar across an eye that weeps blood when bluffing at cards. He finances terrorists but gets into debt when Bond defuses his bomb attempts. (The moral of the story seems to be don't conduct delicate business via text messaging). He holds a high-stakes poker game to get his money back. Vesper Lynd is a treasury official sent to lend Bond the $10m he needs to beat Le Chiffre at Casino Royale. She makes quite an entrance. "I'm the money, " she tells Bond. "Every penny of it, " he quips back.

Moneypenny, the gadget man Q and the smarmy double entendres might have gone the way of the cold war, but Bond's rapport with women is as casually misogynistic as ever. "Don't worry, you are not my type, " Bond tells her. "Smart?"

she says. "Single, " he fires back.

(Incidentally, the only gadget to be found in Bond's Aston Martin DBS is a defibrillator . . . handy for those heart-stopping action moments).

And what would a Bond movie be like without plenty of Bond-girl action? Well, still a Bond film.

Craig's Bond only beds Lynd after he falls in love with her and leaves another one on the hotel floor when she slips him the information he needs a little too early. In fact, most of the action Bond sees between his legs is when Le Chiffre ties him naked to a seatless chair and whips his testicles with a knotted rope. It's a torture to watch, and Craig howls in humiliation before jeering masochistically to hit him again "a little to the right".

It brings to mind the scene in Goldfinger when Sean Connery, strapped to a table, watches a laser beam slowly tracing its way up to his private parts. "Do you expect me to talk?" he asked. "No, " says Goldfinger. "I expect you to die!" On that occasion, Bond lived.

Despite the doom merchants who from the start predicted the demise of Daniel Craig, this Bond too will be around for quite some time.