Although the scene itself was tender, with Bond cradling Mathis in his arms, it was immediately juxtaposed with Bond dumping his lifeless body in a dumpster and taking his wallet. The importance of this scene and James Bond’s actions afterward should not be understated. After being shot by police officers, Mathis’ final words were to tell Bond to forgive himself and to forgive Vesper Lynd. In La Paz, Mathis was betrayed by his supposed friend the Colonel of the Bolivian Police Department (Fernando Guillen Cuervo). In doing this, Bond enlisted the help of a retired Mathis and the two of them traveled to Bolivia to track down Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric).

Initially, this was revealed as Quantum before the events of Spectre proved that Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s (Christoph Waltz) Spectre organization had been pulling the strings all along. In Quantum of Solace, James Bond searched for the organization behind the villainous Mr. Related: Why 2006's Casino Royale Is Still The Most Popular James Bond Movie It was during this time that Le Chiffre told Bond that Mathis had betrayed him.

Le Chiffre needed to pay back his terrorist backers, but with Bond having won the tournament he kidnapped Vesper Lynd to trap and torture him into revealing the password to the tournament’s winnings. He, along with Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), assisted Bond in beating the terrorist banker Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) in a high-stakes poker tournament in Montenegro. In Casino Royale, James Bond gained an ally and friend in the form of René Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini). Through those movies, Daniel Craig’s James Bond had an extensive character arc that effectively saw him move from being a cold-blooded killer to an emotionally engaged man who was prepared to sacrifice his life for the sake of the people he loved. As the first of the Daniel Craig Bond movies, Casino Royale laid much of the groundwork for the long-form story that would play out over the next fifteen years in Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre, and No Time to Die. Whether or not James Bond was betrayed by René Mathis in Casino Royale has been a cause of some confusion ever since the movie was released in 2006.

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