More and more Peirce Brosnan has been coasting on the good will of audiences who remember his earlier work with some fondness, and in “The November Man” he specifically targets those who appreciated his stint as James Bond. But only a fan blinded by nostalgia could find anything of value in such a pastiche of old-fashioned espionage clichés, clumsily stitched together and even more ineptly executed.

The script by Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek is ostensibly based on “There Are No Spies,” one of a series of books featuring CIA agent Peter Devereaux, but it was published at the tail end of the Cold War in 1987, and so the adaptation is obviously very loose. It begins, however, as the novel does, with Devereaux being lured out of retirement by a mystery involving his former boss, the rough-talking Handley (Bill Smitrovich). The year, however, is 2013; and we’re shown why Devereux retired five years before—because an operation in the Balkans was bungled when Devereaux’s young colleague Mason (Luke Bracey) didn’t follow orders, resulting in the death not only of an assassin but of an innocent child as well.

Now, however, Handley asks Devereaux to come back for a final mission: bringing his old flame Natalia (Mediha Musliovic) in from the cold. She’s been working undercover in Moscow as an aide to Russian politico Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski), a right-wing ex-general who’s in line to assume the presidency, and has supposedly collected data that could derail his candidacy. In the escape attempt, however, Devereaux finds himself betrayed, apparently at the instance of Handley’s boss Weinstein (Will Patton), and in the ensuing mayhem Natalia is killed by none other than Mason, now one of the agency’s top men in Belgrade.

That sets Devereaux off, and he’s out to avenge himself on both Federov and Weinstein. It would be fruitless (as well as unkind) to try to disentangle all the twists that follow in the convoluted plot. Suffice it to say that it involves an atrocity that occurred during the so-called Second Chechen War (1999-2009), a refugee girl who apparently has information damaging to Federov, a pretty social worker named Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko),a New York Times reporter doing a story on Federov (Patrick Kennedy), an assassin working for Federov (Amila Terzimehic), and a next-door neighbor of Mason’s named Sarah (Eliza Taylor) who abruptly becomes his squeeze, just in time to become a damsel-in-distress.

That last plot turn is only one of many that will have viewers scratching their heads, largely because there’s no preparation for them. Another concerns a bombshell about Devereaux’s family situation that’s suddenly announced in the last reel, simply to provide a basis for a showdown between Peter and the ultimate villain of the piece. A third involves the fate of that important Chechen refugee girl. In each case the arbitrariness of the shift makes it virtually impossible to swallow what’s happening on screen.

That difficulty, moreover, is increased exponentially by the utter incompetence with which the action is staged by director Roger Donaldson, a competent craftsman who once upon a time (in the eighties, actually) helmed pretty good movies like “The Bounty” and “No Way Out” before turning increasingly to schlock (like “Cocktail” and another Brosnan misfire, “Dante’s Peak”), and his cameraman Romain Lacourbas. When Devereaux invades the Belgrade hotel where Federov is staying, he makes his way through the suspiciously small security detail—all of whom are lousy shots, of course—with incredible ease to reach his target; and even more ridiculous is his confrontation a few minutes later with Mason, in which their fisticuffs are staged as a murky, in-your-face brawl, presumably in order to camouflage the fact that for the most part a stuntman is standing in for Brosnan. One needn’t even mention the way in which the bad guys finally get their comeuppance, a device lifted from “Three Days of the Condor” that doesn’t even notice the power of on-line communication over newspapers in the present environment; or the stereotype female assassin of Tarzimehic, who could have stepped out of an “Our Man Flint” flick (she even prepares for her job by doing splits in her hotel room).

Pierce, meanwhile, tries to give Devereaux some intensity, but he’s defeated by the fact that the character shifts his tone—at one moment a cool-as-a-cucumber killing machine, at the next a blubbering sentimentalist—so abruptly that it’s hard to make out who he is, or to care. Nobody else makes much of an impression except for Smitrovich and Patton, and they do so for the wrong reasons—the former blusters badly, while the latter’s pursed lips and zombie eyes suggest catatonia. (Perhaps he was just terrified at appearing with what is either an awful hairdo or a worse wig.) Bracey is nothing more than a blankly handsome face. The Serbian locations are actually quite good, however—and often more enjoyable to watch than the actors.

Without spoiling things, one might add that “The November Man” suffers in particular because the final revelations are reminiscent of a major plot point in the still-in-release Philip Seymour Hoffman film, “A Most Wanted Man.” But apart from the last word in each title, the pictures share virtually nothing, the Hoffman film conveying an acerbic, piercing sense of post-9/11 realism and Brosnan’s a fatiguing, been-there-seen-that tone of empty-headed wish-fulfillment.

There’s no comparison between the work of their two stars, either—the one brilliantly complex, the other merely rehashing tired clichés.