Skyfall, Seven magazine review - Telegraph The Bond franchise fared badly when it briefly attempted to imitate the relentless pace of the Bourne films, as it did in Quantum of Solace. Yet although Skyfall has its share of explosions, chases and shoot-outs, it has a more thoughtful core. At the heart of the plot is the notion of MI6 as a kind of replacement family, in which agents are trained, nurtured and dispatched for business or battle, with the watchful eye of the organisation upon them. The difference, of course, is that an agent's life or security can be traded for the overriding interests of the nation. When M remarks casually that "orphans always make the best recruits" the chime of professional calculation makes the statement briefly unsettling: what form of guardianship is on offer? Here, both Bond and Silva appear as M's institutional adult children, two warring sons of MI6 with complicated feelings towards a "Mummy" whose affection for them is openly finite. Although Naomie Harris is sharp and engaging as Bond's sometime fellow-operative, it is Dench whom the camera caresses most meaningfully and often. Bardem, as ever, plays the villain with worrisome élan. If his incongruous hairstyle as the assassin in No Country for Old Men (a kind of hangdog bob) did much to commend him to our fears, then this one is just as effective: a bleached-blonde, dank bouffant, beneath which his face looms large, with that monumental profile that looks - as Philip Larkin memorably said of Ted Hughes - like a Christmas present from Easter Island. When Silva plays host to Bond on the decaying, deserted island on which he nurses his unspeakable ambitions, his manner veers from knowingly camp to openly psychopathic. If both Bond and M operate on the same traditional British register of contained emotion, in which the merest twitch of a lip speaks volumes, then Silva is off the dramatic scale: his range of expression encompasses everything from reproach to mass murder. It is not a perfectly structured film: the final third sprawls and drags a little, and a cynic might reflect - without giving too much away - that Bond himself is developing a tendency to risk and promise much without successfully delivering. But it's far from dull, and for much of the time, it dazzles. This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph. Follow us on Twitter @TelegraphSeven