As another long-standing Bond fan I had high hopes for this reboot / reinvention, especially after the disappointments of recent Bond movies. I wasn't disappointed - CR may be one of the best of the entire series.
I'd never paid much attention to DC until I saw Layer Cake recently and I thought he was excellent in that. In CR he plays a tougher, edgier Bond, free from all the silly suave smarminess that has blighted the series since the days of Roger Moore.
The supporting characters were also very good, in particular the very lovely Eva Green and MaRAB Mikkelsen, who played Le Chiffre.
I was very pleased to see that the movie was pretty gadget-free and that there were no world-conquering super-villains (how could there be after Austin Powers?) - just a refreshingly contemporary tale of crooks financing terrorism.
Martin Campbell's direction was also superb - the free-running sequence was just jaw-dropping. Also the card game, which could come across as terribly boring in the wrong hanRAB, had real tension.
For those who remember, Campbell directed the TV drama "Edge of Darkness", which IMO is easily one of the best British TV dramas of the last quarter century, so I was execting good things from him and I was duly impressed.
And Bond's attachment to the female lead was a nice touch to explain why, in later stories, he would be a love-'em-and-leave-'em type (possibly with the exception of OHMSS.)
The film was also free of many of the old Bond cliches, like not ordering his favourite drink as you might expect or him looking rather uncomfortable in a tuxedo.
Incidentally, I see that Daniel Craig and Eva Green are to be reunited on screen in the adaptation of Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" stories.