The Man from U.N.C.L.E

Accord­ing to the press notes, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a tele­vi­sion show that exist­ed before the inter­net. It was about spies. Not inci­den­tal­ly, Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is also about spies. Pos­si­bly even the same spies. The year is 1963, and the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis still lingers over world pol­i­tics like a cold snap after a snow storm – or so we’re told (any sense of nuclear dread is con­fined to the mon­tage of archival clips that plays behind a Rober­ta Flack tune dur­ing the open­ing credits).

The action begins in a murky green-screened hellscape that’s meant to be East Berlin, as Amer­i­can agent Napoleon Solo (Hen­ry Cav­ill) liais­es with a sparky young Ger­man mechan­ic named Gaby Teller (Ali­cia Vikan­der), whose miss­ing father knows the secret to build­ing the next great bomb. The meet­ing is invari­ably inter­rupt­ed by a moun­tain­ous Russ­ian assas­sin called Illya Kuryakin (Armie Ham­mer), who’s like Solo but with twice the mus­cle and half the charm. After 15 min­utes of try­ing to kill each oth­er dur­ing a chase sequence that’s as sense­less­ly cut but enjoy­ably scored as all of the oth­er set pieces in this movie, the rivals are made to join forces in their mis­sion to kill a very fash­ion­able arms deal­er played by The Great Gatsby’s Eliz­a­beth Debikci.

Like a live-action Lupin the III that so des­per­ate­ly wish­es it could be a car­toon, Ritchie’s film is a groovy piece of jazz that’s hope­less­ly in search of a decent rhythm. Solo, by far the best char­ac­ter here, is emblem­at­ic of a movie that is all mood and no meat. Riff­ing on the broad-shoul­dered boy scout charm he brought to Super­man in the wretched Man of Steel, Cav­ill delights in play­ing the super-spy that James Bond hopes to be when he grows up, but his blus­ter isn’t enough to over­pow­er the dull dia­logue that Ritchie and Lionel Wigram’s script forces into his mouth. Ham­mer, mean­while – the Boris to Cavill’s Bull­win­kle – is play­ing a Cold War stereo­type writ­ten in sky writing.

The two men man­age to gen­er­ate decent com­bat­ive chem­istry despite nev­er hav­ing any­thing clever to say to one anoth­er (the film’s idea of a joke is to have Kuryakin end­less­ly refer to Solo as ​“Cow­boy”), and their con­trast­ing styles make for a few stel­lar action beats – one bit, in which Solo takes a bit of a breather and watch­es Kuryakin han­dle a few hench­men, is as visu­al­ly sly as any­thing we’ve seen this sum­mer. Not for noth­ing, but the oth­er great sequence here con­sists of noth­ing but Vikan­der danc­ing out of focus in the back­ground; the world is rich, but Ritchie just has no idea how to fore­ground its pleasures.

But, in the proud tra­di­tion of le cin­e­ma du Ritchie, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is yet anoth­er film in which its aes­thet­ics are both its great­est virtue and its most ghast­ly weak­ness. On the one hand, Joan­na Johnston’s cos­tume design is immac­u­late, and Vikan­der wears a mod dress so well that its seems stitched from the fab­ric of space-time, itself. On the oth­er hand, 60 per cent of the movie was shot on gor­geous Euro­pean loca­tions (from the Span­ish Steps to the Good­wood Motor Rac­ing Cir­cuit in West Sus­sex), while the oth­er 40 per cent of it looks like it was shot on the dank base­ment floor of the lair belong­ing to the mud demon, Baïldrokg.

It’s a good thing that the movie sounds as good as it does, Daniel Pemberton’s slinky score help­ing to ensure that the movie is nev­er undone by its lack of grace. And Ritchie’s flair for music (that Tom Zé track is dropped at just the right moment) is matched by his proven gift for cast­ing, which has been no small part of his suc­cess. Debick is an ace vil­lain­ess, adding all sorts of colour to a char­ac­ter who exists as lit­tle more than a car­rot on a stick. And Vikan­der, poor Vikan­der, is under­served by the mate­r­i­al, but she does a bril­liant job of sober­ing up a movie that’s high on the vapours of its own style.