Skyfall is a phenomenon here in NYC. Shows are sold out all over the place, even on weeknights. So even though I have never been much of a James Bond enthusiast, and having only seen a couple of the movies since Roger Moore stopped staring in them, I had to see what all the fuss was about.

Skyfall is diverting enough, if you want an evening of things getting blown up and people getting shot. But by any reasonable standard it is a lame-ass movie.  The first third features an adequate but unscintillating and improbable story idea (Bond thwarting a systematic unveiling of British secret agents embedded in terrorist organizations) which quickly gets relegated to a device setting up the much less interesting main plot: a nutty weirdo in a blonde wig who has dedicated his life to killing poor little Judi Dench. The connection between these two stories is so unimpressive that by the end it feels like you watched two different movies: a political thriller that ended right in the middle, and one of those stupid serial killer movies with a climax scene that drags on for so long you stop caring who lives and who dies.

I can’t even see how James Bond freaks would like this film. Once the main story is engaged the movie is really boring, and frankly feels endless. The “bond girls” are all weak, ineffective, and unsexy. Bond has no cool gadgets at his disposal, in fact he’s low-tech in this one. And does anybody honestly give a shit if M dies? She’s a fucking bureaucrat, if she dies they’ll just replace her with another. At least the old James Bond films featured more significant and unambiguous wrongdoing – nukes, biological warfare, crime syndicates, mass robbery – and there were always hot, sexy women who were smart and formidable. They should have stuck with that formula.

So why is Skyfall so popular? Take a look at its dominant themes: killing your boss, killing your mother, escaping from technology, eviscerating your past. There’s a lot of angry, frustrated people out there, and on some level this film is (perhaps inadvertently) tapping directly into the impotent dissatisfaction they feel about their lives. This is all well and good, I suppose, but it still does not make Skyfall a good movie.