BROCOLLI BOND GAMBLE PAYS OFF ... bet Brosnan's Pierced off

As every review you’ve read has already told you, Casino Royale is a triumphant addition to the Bond cannon, and full marks must go to the franchise-owners for risking it all and messing with the tried and tested formula.

When you see how Bond has regained his cool, it’s easy to think this new style was clearly a dead cert winner. But a lot can go wrong between the first draft of a script and the Royal Premier. In fact, making changes to the MI6 money-spinner was a huge gamble – a real-life high-stakes poker game that changed the rules on a format that on its last outing successfully raked in hundreds of millions of pounds. Get it right and you’re quids in, but back the wrong horse and it’s the glue factory for you.

They’ve removed everything that made Bond formulaic and safe. No puns, not a whiff of the signature tune until the closing credits and a new dark Bond. Where his predecessors moisturised, he bleeds. Suffice to say, the gamble has paid off.

But if there’s one man who won’t be popping the champagne, its former double-o Pierce Brosnan, the man Daniel Craig usurped as Bond. Brosnan had been asking Barbara Brocolli and the Bond team to serve him up exactly this kind of script, action and realism ever since his second Bond outing “Tomorrow Never Dies” was committed to film. He struck gold with Goldeneye, but it was downhill from there, culminating in the school pantomime that was “Die Another Day”. Invisible cars, cyber-suits, celebrity cameos and a punnett of puns that made it feel more like a “Carry On” film than Bond.

James Bond had become Austin Powers’ embarrassing uncle. Once, women wanted him and men wanted to be him. By the end of Brosnan’s reign, the women it the audience wanted him to go away and leave them alone, and men shuffled uncomfortably in their seats as they watched their schoolboy hero reduced to a cartoon effigy.

But Brosnan had spied this well before he was given the boot, and made it clear (both publicly and privately) that he saw the need for Bond to go darker, get real and remove the more comic elements that had become so ingrained in the character’s DNA over the last 40 years. And what did he get for his efforts? Fired. His double-o status rescinded. That’s Hollywood for you – more victims than an MI6 hit-squad.

So spare a thought for Brosnan as you watch his successor lap up the praise. He was a key part in the resurrection of the movie industry’s favourite son - the architect of new Bond. But whereas Craig’s been given dynamite to play with, Brosnan was given blancmange.