The release of a new James Bond movie used to be a big deal for me. I’ve been a lifelong fan of the big-screen adventures of everyone’s favorite secret agent. Not all the movies have been great, but for most of the run of the series they averaged out to be pretty good, a reliable every-few-years source of enjoyment.

Then, in 2002, came Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s last outing as 007 and one of the five worst movies I’ve ever paid money to see in a theater. I was absolutely repulsed by the movie’s oppressive badness. The experience of watching that movie was like when you’re a little kid and a bully pushes you down and farts on your head, except the bully was thirty feet tall and the fart was in deafening Dolby surround sound and lasted for 133 minutes.

Now, I’m usually of the opinion that the reboot of a series of long standing is a pointless and often lazy technique, but when it was announced that the next Bond movie, Casino Royale (2006), was going to be a back-to-basics restart of the Bond franchise, I thought perhaps it was the only thing that could redeem Agent 007. Still, the taste that Die Another Day left in my mouth was so foul that I didn’t see Casino Royale until two years later. Yes, Die Another Day was so bad it brought an immediate end to my years-long policy of rushing right out to see the next Bond movie. When I did get around to seeing it, I was pleasantly surprised by Casino Royale. I didn’t love it, but it was pretty good—an enjoyably average entry in the series, and a breath of fresh air after the previous one.

In 2008 came the ludicrously titled Quantum of Solace, and though Casino Royale had somewhat restored my faith I still didn’t bother to see the movie until about a week ago.

And, guess what, it sucked. It was such a waste of more than 100 minutes of my time that, coupled with the still festering bad feelings generated by Die Another Day, it pretty much turned me off of the whole James Bond series. While it couldn’t wrest the coveted title of Worst James Bond Movie of All Time away from Die Another Day, it was still asinine enough to make it so I truly don’t care if I ever see another 007 adventure.

In case you didn’t see Quantum of Solace (and if you didn’t, I envy you), let me tell you a little something about it. The main villain, in the tradition of Bond-film megalomaniacs, has a dastardly plan only Bond can stop. You don’t even find out what that plan is until about half an hour before the end of the picture, but when you do, hoo boy. Are you sitting down? You had better be sitting down and holding on to your testicles because I am about to tell you the details of the evil villain’s master plan, and it is a plan of such world-shattering import that you might pass out. What he’s planning to do, for reasons that are never entirely clear, is take control of some—but not all—of the water supply of Bolivia.

OH, NO!

Okay, in a Bond movie we expect the villain’s master plan to be ridiculous. Sure, Blofeld is smuggling diamonds because he is using them to build a giant laser gun in space. That’s crazy, but he’s doing it so he can take the entire world hostage for gobs and gobs of money. That’s what a supervillain does. He doesn’t take over part of the utilities contract for one South American nation. I mean, honestly: when’s the last time you heard anything about Bolivia? If a bad guy strapped the entire country to rockets and fired it into space, would you even know that it was gone? Outside of Bolivia itself, would anyone?

I wish it were only the underwhelming plot that made Quantum of Solace a bad movie. But let’s consider the pre-credits car chase. Bond is in a black car, driving fast. He’s being chased by some people (who? why?) in another (or possibly more than one?) black car. A keen observer may have already spotted the problem here. For a hint, let’s consider the car chase through the streets of Las Vegas in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever. On that occasion, Bond was pursued by standard black and white police cruisers, while he drove a bright red Mustang. Are you getting the picture now?

When your car chase involves heroes and villains driving what amounts to precisely the same car, you can’t tell what in the hell is going on! The problem is only compounded by the fact that the average shot length in this sequence is about .000000004 seconds, with the camera shaking the whole time. The cuts come so fast and furious you never get a chance to tell what or who you’re looking at or why. Maybe some exciting stunts are happening, but who can tell? Maybe they’re real, but they might as well be faked because you never get a good solid look at them.

Contrast that with this stunt from The Man With the Golden Gun (1974).

Go ahead and ignore that slide whistle, pleaseOne, unbroken take! That’s how you make a stunt interesting, fellas. We can see what happened and we can tell it happened for real.All the action sequences are edited in the same way. The viewer never even gets a chance to get excited.

So, you’ve got incomprehensible action, you’ve got Judi Dench as the dignified M saying “I don’t give a shit,” and you’ve got nothing happening for 75 minutes until you find out that Bolivia’s water supply is sort of partly in danger, and then you’ve got nothing else happening for the next 30 minutes.

I’m not going to take that from you anymore, 007. That was your last chance and you blew it. I’m done with your movies forever.

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