The Man from UNCLE review: Style paired with deathly boring substance
Guy Ritchie has revamped the 60s TV spy caper The Man From UNCLE with co-screenwriter and co-producer Lionel Wigram, adding sex interest and machoising any residual hint of camp, but slathering the whole thing in lugubrious, self-indulgent men’s-mag type tailoring and style in various photoshoot Euro locations. Inevitably, he’s offering an “origin myth” account of this international secret-agent team. There’s some nice early-60s period production design and the whole thing moves along smoothly, if unhurriedly. But it never delivers anything like the punch of Tom Cruise’s M:I adventures, nor the wit and distinctiveness of 007. And the two male leads, Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer, are fantastically dull and uncharismatic, with all the sexy danger of a pair of M&S men’s underwear models, easily upstaged by their cheerfully pert co-star Alicia Vikander. And in fact all three are entirely outclassed by an airy cameo from Hugh Grant as the dry British intelligence chief Waverly, giving one-and-all an object lesson in scene-stealing.
The original had its détente pairing of US spy Napoleon Solo, played by the lean-faced Robert Vaughn, and the blond Soviet Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum. Now it’s Cavill as Solo, that Superman kiss curl always threatening to assert itself. He’s a US agent in cold war Berlin, often wearing a stuffy and uncomfortable-looking three-piece suit, on the trail of a missing nuclear scientist whose lush daughter Gaby (Vikander) is improbably working there as a car mechanic. It’s a preposterous skill which is never really needed, except when she suggests tuning up a racing car in one scene. Maybe this got lost in the edit.
The trailer for The Man from UNCLE
When this boffin-MacGuffin dad figure appears to have gone rogue, working for some sinister Italian plutocrat who wants global nuclear mastery, Solo is ordered by his irascible handler – a juicy minor role for Jared Harris – to co-operate with his killer Russkie counterpart (Hammer) to nab him, because the CIA and KGB have a mutual interest in ensuring bomb technology does not fall into the hands of a rogue player. So they all have to team up to save the world.
Illya is a role Hammer handles with a grumpy beefcake deadpan, the point of which is to adorably soften as his bromance with Solo warms and as he falls in love with Gaby, while Solo underlines his own heterosexual credentials by seducing a sexy hotel receptionist. But there is no chemistry to be seen anywhere. Ritchie gives us an entertaining, rickety Trabant car chase at the very beginning, but from then on the forthright verities of action and tension are abandoned in favour of supposed stylishness, creamy art direction and uninteresting dialogue, subtitled and otherwise. A potentially tense and exciting scene with a truck becoming submerged in water with its driver at the wheel becomes an essay in self-indulgence as the audio track cuts out everything except the Italian pop song on the radio. Is it artistic? I guess it could be – it isn’t exciting.
Ritchie is a director whose recent Sherlock Holmes adventures with Robert Downey Jr showed that he could still deliver entertaining, high-octane films. These virtues are absent here, and the prospect of more UNCLE films like this makes me worry that the bad guys are releasing nerve-paralysis gas into cinemas inducing symptoms identical to fatal boredom.