By the 24th Bond flick, we all know the drill: suave secret agent dispatches assassins, deals with random bureaucratic nonsense, courts mortal danger and beautiful women, all while blithely traveling across multiple continents en route to uncovering some heinous, criminal scheme.

Spectre checks all these boxes, and more. We have the same absurdly overdressed characters: Bond (Daniel Craig) in his endless collection of suits, and the new Bond girl, Madeleine, (Lea Seydoux) in slinky designer evening wear. The requisite gadgets, including explosives and cars with unusual capabilities, make their predictable entrances. There are the same car chases, plane crashes, top-secret meetings, and threatening thugs. The villain, of course, is some madman with grandiose inclinations who never seems completely human. Buildings have ticking time bonds in them, and tend to collapse. Madeleine—a psychiatrist with a successful practice—falls for Bond and subsequently loses much of her personality, seeming more like a gorgeous accessory and hapless damsel-in-distress than a fully-formed character.

During this sluggish reminder of what a Bond movie should consist of, the viewer’s exhaustion and creeping suspicion that Bond movies are getting old echoes the on-screen reality: the age in which Bond was relevant and necessary is rapidly passing away. His unit is being wound up, as we enter an age of integrated big data that leaves no space for an unreliable human agent. Consequently, any emotional complexity that Spectre might have stems from the wistful feeling of vanishing time. One almost gets exhausted thinking about the number of unpleasant things (and people) Bond has had to execute over the years; one wonders what’s left after a life spent relentlessly on the move. Bond seems to feel his own anachronism: there is something in his eyes, in his gait, in the gallery of women who have died on him during his tenure as 007 that exudes emptiness and fatigue. After years, and 24 movies, maybe it’s time for Bond to gracefully take a break.