The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Director: Guy Ritchie
Stars: Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander
Duration: 116 mins
Class: 12
KRS Cinema Releasing
The spy genre has always been widely popular with audiences from the early days of cinema until today. Exciting, escapist and oftentimes romantic, myriad films in the genre have captured the imagination over the decades with their thrilling stories about the murky workings of the higher echelons of secret services and international espionage. From classics of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, from the likes of director Alfred Hitchcock to the adventures of Jason Bourne via, of course, the supreme James Bond, it is a genre that has entertained us for many decades.
Spies have, of course, also inhabited books, comics and TV; and it is to TV that director Guy Ritchie has turned to for inspiration for his latest big screen venture.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a successful American TV series that ran for four seasons in the mid- to late 1960s. It was set during that period of the Cold War and had at its centre a CIA and a KGB agent forced to work together to save the world from some enemy bent on its destruction…
… which is the premise of this shiny and new incarnation starring Henry Cavill as American agent Napoleon Solo and Armie Hammer as Russian Ilya Kuryakin.
The film takes place in 1963. The Berlin Wall has just come up, heightening the tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. When a prominent German nuclear scientist disappears, he is feared kidnapped by a shady international organisation; the Americans seek out his estranged daughter Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) who may be the only way of tracing her father. Solo and Kuryakin must put their natural enmity aside to save the world from mass destruction.
There is much to praise and enjoy in U.N.C.L.E. Ritchie and his team have recreated the era impeccably, with the protagonists jet-setting their way from the grim oppressiveness of life in the East of the Berlin Wall to la dolce vita of 1960s Rome. The look is also impeccable with immaculate costumes and superb production designs that easily capture 1960s cool and elegance.
Its undeniable style, however, is not matched by substance. Its greatest flaw is its completely unimaginative premise... the screenplay by Ritchie and Lionel Wigram having our two intrepid agents on the hunt for a nuclear weapon in a storyline we have seen a million times before.
There is much to praise and enjoy
It feels like all the boxes are being accurately ticked, but there is little that is truly innovative either in the story or its execution.
While it canters along at a brisk pace and offers a couple of giggles along the way, it is difficult to shake the feeling of déjà vu that lingers throughout notwithstanding the solid action.
Ritchie has always excelled in his action pieces and the film is peppered with them, but there is very little sense of danger or intrigue which detracts from the experience, somewhat. Moreover, the villains of the piece feel a little cartoony with Elizabeth Debicki’s femme fatale Veronica Vinciguerra, her Italian playboy husband Alexander and Gaby’s Nazi-loving, sneering Uncle Rudi having little depth.
That the characters – Americans, Russians, Germans, British and Italian – speak in erratic accents doesn’t help much.
The film’s greatest assets are by far its leads and Cavill and Hammer have charm and wit to spare. The dynamic between them is powerful, the banter hilarious and oftentimes they come across as an old married couple.
They are forever bickering in their juvenile attempts at one-upmanship over the other after desperately trying to kill each other on first meeting only to discover (to their chagrin) that they have to work together. The two actors inhabit their respective roles with aplomb.
Cavill’s Solo may initially come across as Bond Lite. Yet, he is effortlessly smooth as the ex-con turned spy, the debonair womaniser, the wise-cracker and the one for whom rules were made to be broken. Hammer’s Kuryakin is the polar opposite – he’s is stoic, compliant and follows orders to the letter.
Of the two characters, his is the more interesting with some unresolved parental issues in his past that need to be addressed if he is to control his volatile temper. The perennially busy Alicia Vikander more than holds her own opposite her two male co-stars.
As the film’s coda suggests, there is more to come. If enough innovation and energy is injected in it, there is lots of life left in the good, old-fashioned spy thriller.