The James Bond movie franchise turns 50 this year and continues with Daniel Craig in the title role. But to hear everybody in “Skyfall” debate whether, after 23 movies, James is now too long in the tooth for glamorous spy craft — the leaping onto speeding trains, the sneaking up behind a sexy lady as she showers — you would think the star of this movie is Methuselah. “Skyfall” refers to James’s boyhood manor. But, really, it’s what Chicken Little calls his action thriller, not 007.

At almost 2½ hours, the movie plays like a long, familiar family conversation: Should we put dad in a home or not? This idea of retirement comes up over and over, and it does so at the expense of the actual fun of these movies: their exaggerated interpretation of international politics — warlords, terrorists, greedy pigs, insane demands, the pathological need of sex to be had.

“Skyfall,” which has a midnight showing tonight at the Jordan’s Furniture IMAX theaters in Reading and Natick, doesn’t feature much of any of that. The movie gives us Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), an evil former agent who’s still mad about his treatment by MI6 and its ruthless director, M (Judi Dench). He wants the British intelligence agency in general and M in particular to suffer, so he steals a file with the names of NATO field operatives and begins to blow their cover, one mission at a time. He also has a computer virus obliterate the headquarters and flash ominous messages on M’s laptop. Obviously, she needs her precious 007 to stop the destruction. But before he can begin, James’s fitness for work is questioned. He was presumed dead after the film’s opening sequences and returns to London a drunken wreck. The security breach and James’s resurrection prompt the new intelligence and security chairman, Gareth Malloy (Ralph Fiennes), to question whether it’s time to put both the spy and his boss out to pasture. It’s the dignified thing to do, Malloy tells M. “Oh, to hell with dignity,” she spits, Denchly.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn’t worried about world safety. It’s fretting over whether to start wearing Depends. After more than an hour, Silva reveals himself, among the vivid brutalist ruins of Japan’s deserted Hashima Island. The combination of Bardem’s slabby handsomeness and his newly yellow hair and orange eyebrows achieves unsightly alchemy: He’s Frankenstein’s Ken doll. Silva ties James up to a chair and proceeds to fondle, among other parts, his Adam’s apple. It’s quite a moment, one that both deliberately echoes a grisly torture sequence in “Casino Royale” (a much livelier evening at the movies, with Craig’s maiden outing as Bond) and implies the character’s bisexuality. Silva is flirting with Bond, and, sadly, “Skyfall” is flirting with us. Silva brings bond to Hashima Island not for sex, but to lecture him about what dinosaurs they all are — Bond, M, the agency, the series, their technology, their jet-set approach to intelligence.

The script is credited to John Logan and two regular Bond screenwriters, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. The film’s been directed by Sam Mendes, an Englishman with a high style that can either mask mediocre material (“American Beauty”) or find unexpected moral art in familiar subject matter (the first Gulf war in “Jarhead”). I don’t know what Mendes believed he could bring to the series that would have freed it from all that it’s obligated to do. It seems as if Silva’s contempt for M — his vengeance is like that of a spurned child — and her discovery of an orphaned James might push the film into strange psychological territory, that M might be some rethinking of the manipulator Angela Lansbury played in “The Manchurian Candidate,” that the “M” might stand, sardonically, for “Mommy.” But the misogyny in this movie doesn’t extend that far. It’s still mostly women as bait, screw-ups, and exercise.