There's something risible about the theme of senescence dominating a Bond film. It's almost worthless to bother pointing out that 007 is nothing if not an archetype of a certain kind of vigor and predictable resilience. Oddly enough in this, the 23rd Bond film, we don't have the familiar politically incorrect, unapologetic champion of womanizing, booze, gambling, killing, etc. Sam Mendes gives us a different Bond, a Bond with some depth but without enough gadgets and it's not quite satisfying.

The film is about Bond, M and MI6 trying to claw their way back to competency after some epic slip ups. To make matters worse they're all under siege from administrative efforts at modernization. To make matters far worse there's a rogue former agent (Javier Bardem) up to some naughtiness that threatens to push all the good people to their limits. What's also new here is a certain abortive realism and it's entirely unwelcome. For example, Bond has real substance/addiction issues but they're never dealt with, only swept under the rug so he can return to duty. For another example, the villain's sexual orientation is hastily (occasionally even in offensive stereotype) established as gay, but cui bono? Should we celebrate that our first Bondian homoeroticism involves a deeply troubled man living in loveless isolation? Is this a ***** in chauvinism or its extreme? The whole thing confuses me and smacks of some boardroom effort to court young audiences and I want it out of my genre films.

Skyfall is also something of a bricolage of biggish ideas that cohere extremely poorly. The biggest idea is that modern, non-state warfare has an ambiguous relationship to human hands: when they seem irrelevant perhaps they become most essential. The second biggest idea is that evil lurks close to good and even spawns from it (the Biblical undertones are nauseating). The third biggest idea is that elite members of MI6 have a cuddly Oedipal relationship to M and Country (please reply to this email if you've seen the film and don't think that Mother England and Mother M have psycho-sexual ties with the agents).

[Brief aside: Bardem can do no wrong as the villain here and the film is worth seeing just to spend time with his idiosyncratic Lecter-esque blend of madness and majesty]

There's definitely room in the world for an unconventional, non-agist progressive spy film but on the 50th anniversary of the greatest film franchise of all time we probably deserve slightly more swagger, less strained witticism, a higher body count, and more cool toys.