In the 1960s, television’s “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” lasted only four seasons, but it took Hollywood 12 years to bring the film version from green light to silver screen. Enough actors, writers and directors were attached to the film project to populate half a dozen major motion pictures. Finally, British writer-director Guy Ritchie brought it to fruition with Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer in the lead roles.
For those who don’t remember, U.N.C.L.E. was a fictional international agency, a glimmer of international cooperation in the Cold War, headed by a U.S.-U.S.S.R. team of agents, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin. Ritchie crafted an origin story for the agency and its two super-spies, setting it in 1963, the year before the TV series debuted. Turns out, the dapper Solo (Cavill) was an art thief blackmailed into joining the CIA; and the somber Kuryakin (Hammer), son of a Communist Party boss imprisoned for corruption, has a lot to prove to his superiors in the KGB. They heartily dislike each other from their first encounter, and each is under orders to kill the other—if necessary. And yet, they are teamed together in a joint mission: to stop the rogue development of nuclear warheads, which could endanger both superpowers.
The warheads are being developed by a German scientist named Teller who fell into the hands of a criminal corporate entity based in Italy. The brain behind that free-enterprise operation is the coldest of femme fatales, Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki). The only way to locate Teller and halt that scheme is through his daughter, an auto mechanic trapped in Communist Germany, Gaby (Alicia Vikander). With Kuryakin posing as her fiancé and Solo hanging discretely in the background, they journey to Rome, adding a dose of La Dolce Vita to the jet-set setting.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has glaring weaknesses, starting with car chases as weightless and programmed as computer game visuals and plot points whose silliness verges on incoherence. Vikander is incapable of maintaining a German accent—she sounds more Lower Manhattan than East Berlin. And yet there is much to like. Hugh Grant brings panache to his part as Mr. Waverly, reinvented by Ritchie as a British naval intelligence chief (the Brits help save the day!). The film is stylish without falling for period clichés, and the light tone in the face of potential global catastrophe is in step with the original “U.N.C.L.E.” Ritchie moves the pieces along swiftly like a multi-episode TV show with a high production budget.
The sharpest distinction between U.N.C.L.E. in the ’60s and the ’10s is the relationship between Solo and Kuryakin. In the original, Solo was the intended hero and Kuryakin the trusted sidekick (though many fans preferred the younger Russian to the middle-aged American). In Ritchie’s telling, Solo is clever but overshadowed by Kuryakin’s physical prowess and ingenuity. Even the Soviet gadgets work better than their American counterparts—this at a time when Russia was ahead in the space race and the AK-47 was outgunning the M-16. Perhaps there is also a reference here to the geopolitics of the present day? Whatever meaning can be extracted from the scenario, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. provides color, character, action and an opportunity to escape into a place and time that—despite the looming threat of the Cold War—seems more fun than now.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
3 stars
Henry Cavill
Armie Hammer
Directed by Guy Ritchie
Rated PG-13
