Given the choice last week to attend either a preview screening of Casino Royale or Deja Vu, I picked the Tony Scott film. Admittedly I was influenced by the desire to see how Scott handled the post-Katrina New Orleans location, but I also had next to no interest in the Bond film. I like Daniel Craig well enough in other movies, and have no problem with the "blond Bond" thing. No, it's a deeper problem, one that I'm hesistant to confess, because my editor called me a Communist when I brought it up: I'm just not into Bond films.

I'll watch the occasional Bond film on vacation in a hotel room when we're flipping channels at night. (No, that's not a euphemism.) I believe I've watched all the pre-Brosnan films because some TNT used to run Bond marathons whenever I visited my parents, who have cable and go to bed at 10 pm. But I haven't been tempted to a theater to see 007 since college. My favorite Bond movie is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and that's mainly because of Diana Rigg. But I'd rather see a spy-related movie from two years earlier -- James Coburn in The President's Analyst. I'll watch other action-adventure films or spy thrillers, so it's not the genre. Why don't I care much about James Bond? Let me count the ways, below.
  • Bond himself (yawn). Perhaps it's because I grew up with the Roger Moore-era Bond, but I never found 007 to be that interesting a character. When I started watching the Bond films, I was young enough to view Moore as just some old guy in a tux. (Never thought of Cary Grant that way, though.) Sean Connery's Bond is most convincing, but has a brutal streak I dislike watching. Licence to Kill was the last Bond movie I saw in a theater, and Timothy Dalton was so humorless that I'm surprised I'll watch any Bond movie after that. I keep forgetting Pierce Brosnan was even Bond and tend to think of him as That Guy From Remington Steele. I like all the actors ... but in other roles.
  • The Bond girls. You knew we wouldn't get through this list without my mentioning the Bond girls. Some of them are strong and cool and ass-kicking, but somehow they all need to be rescued by the end. And they all fall for Bond unless they're lesbians or insane (and even then ...), and most of them use sex as a weapon, either emotionally or physically. And of course, the names. I can live my life quite happily without encountering another character named Pussy Galore or Plenty O'Toole or Holly Goodhead. I know we have Judi Dench as M to compensate these days, but it's not enough for me.
  • Idiotic (if colorful) villains. Even the geniuses are idiots. I'm not the first one to make fun of the continual habit of Bond bad guys to pontificate about their evil plans until Bond escapes; or having captured Bond, attempt to kill him in some elaborate way from which he can escape. Why doesn't someone try to shoot him right in the head and be done with it? At least the villains are always good campy fun to watch, more so than the Bonds themselves. (One Bond film I have a guilty liking for is Live and Let Die, mainly because of Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi.)
  • Recycled plots and action scenes. Someone is trying to take over the world, or maybe just destroy it if they're feeling particularly cranky. That someone is assisted by some quirky henchmen and maybe a few curvaceous double-agents. Bond tries to stop them. At some point he will be captured, but of course he'll escape. He'll be assisted by interesting gadgets and a few curvaceous double-agents, at least one of which will fall for him, or sleep with him and double-cross him later. Exotic locations will be involved in an attempt to make the movie seem different from the last half-dozen ... but how many ski/snowmobile chases can you watch in one lifetime, anyway?
  • Too many gadgets. Actually, the scenes with Desmond Llewelyn as Q were always some of my favorite parts of Bond movies. Watching him demonstrate the little gadgets was delightful. But Bond relies on the toys a little too often sometimes, and they can get way out of hand, especially the souped-up cars. An invisible car is far too implausible for me.
  • Those awful one-liners. Roger Moore was the worst perpetrator, but it's a Bond trademark -- the idiotic double-entendres that are about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and the one-liners that are supposed to sound witty but often fall flat. (I do like Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny, though, even when her dialogue borders on the cringeworthy.) And I am increasingly becoming less fond of films in which the protagonist utters something clever after killing someone, no matter how evil the victim was.
  • Overall: too generic. No director has ever put his own distinctive stamp on the Bond films -- they're supposed to look alike and sound alike, which is why I tend to get them all mixed up. I remember when the rumors were flying about the possibility of a Tarantino-directed Casino Royale. Now that, I would have gone to see in a heartbeat. Imagine if he'd cast George Clooney as Bond! (Or Uma Thurman. Heh.) But no, that was too different and interesting for the Bond producers, who seem to be all about the formula. If the films are all so similar, can't I be forgiven for not wanting to see any more?
[Special thanks to my friend Todd, whose book-length essay "Heavy Bondage" helped refresh my memory on several details about the Bond series.]