In 1964, the Cold War has put the U.S. and the USSR at each other’s throats. However, suave CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and hulking KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) are forced to team with each other in order to prevent a nuclear warhead developed by a German scientist for Italian millionaire Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki) from falling into the wrong hands. Though at first at cross purposes, Solo and Kuryakin search for Gabby Teller (Alicia Vikander), the scientist’s estranged daughter and perhaps the only way they can hope to intercept the warhead.
Warner Bros. has been trying to make a big screen adaptation of the 1964-1968 spy television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. for over twenty years. In that time, nearly every leading man you can think of – from Leonardo DiCaprio to Russell Crowe to Tom Cruise – was courted for the lead roles. With that in mind, Cavill and Hammer seem somewhat out of their elements. Despite being Superman, Cavill is far from being a movie star, and Hammer’s stock has yet to recover from the disaster of playing second fiddle to Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger. This means that the biggest star in the movie is, surprisingly, Hugh Grant, who has a solid supporting role that is entirely different from the parts he was playing when co-writer/director Guy Ritchie started to make a name for himself in the late 1990s. However, the lack of star power doesn’t hurt the film, though it will likely hurt the box office.
Ritchie’s cinema cool works just as well in the 1960s as it did in the 1990s or, in the case of Sherlock Holmes, the 1890s. He doesn’t so much parody Cold War spy thrillers, as a lesser director might, than celebrate what has made those movies so enduringly popular. Still, this is a Ritchie movie with a thick layer of studio sheen on it – this might have only cost a reported $75 million (a bargain by Hollywood summer blockbuster standards), but it lacks the low budget grit of Ritchie’s best work. But seeing Cavill and Hammer strut in their 1960s best designer clothing is very cool. Nonetheless, the quips are extra quippy and the double entendres are extra raunchy because at its heart this is just as much a strange bedfellows buddy cop movie than it is a spy thriller.
Which results in what is the real problem with The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: beneath all this gloss is a generic action movie that features some very cool sequences – Ritchie is almost on Quentin Tarrantino’s level when it comes to using music in his films – but is at best a slightly above average movie. It isn’t that the performances are bad, even though the accents are sometimes all over the place – Alicia Vikander’s is by far the worst and the script’s muddling of her national origin seems an attempt to cover for that – and Hammer is clearly trying his best Ivan Drago impression at points. It’s that for all the style there’s very little substance. For example, Vikander has little more to do than look pretty for the first two thirds of the film. Unlike the fun Kingsman: The Secret Service – which, incidentally, was directed by Ritchie’s collaborator Matthew Vaughn – the story doesn’t hold up to the visuals.
Warner Bros. is obviously trying to capitalize on the twenty-plus year investment on the rights to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. by hoping that this becomes a new franchise. While the basic concept of this film could easily lead to sequels, it is unlikely that audiences will look at this as something they’d want to see more of. Ritchie, Cavill, and Hammer all appear to be trying their best, but it just doesn’t seem like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was something that necessarily needed to be brought to the big screen, at least in this form.
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