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

When it comes to Guy Ritchie films, you either love them or hate them but one thing is for sure, no matter what the movie is you’re pretty much guaranteed to be taken on some sort of highly entertaining, hyper stylistic, fun action/adventure romp through his wild imagination. The Man From U.N.C.L.E., while not without its flaws, is yet another solid entry in Ritchie’s portfolio.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is a feature film adaptation of the ‘60’s television show of the same name. Serving as a sort of prequel to the actual forming of said spy organization, the film follows former thief turned CIA operative Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Russian KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) as they reluctantly join forces with Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), the daughter of a former Nazi scientist, to stop an evil plan to blow up some place before it’s too-blah-blah-typical-spy-movie-plot-points-blah…whatever.

In all honesty, the story of this film isn’t really all that important, or more accurately, not as important as the film tries to make it. In all double honesty, it’s actually where the film kind of falls flat, which, to me at least, seems like the filmmakers understood completely because boy does everything else deliver in spades. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

The heart of the film, as it really always should be, is the relationships between the main characters and how the actors portraying said characters mesh together onscreen. If you don’t have this basic chemistry down pat, everything in the film starts to unravel from that point forward and a majority of the time can never recover. Cavil and Hammer, for example, are perfectly cast as enemies turned partners turned close friends and what an enjoyable, funny and downright amusing pair these two make. Not only do they help some of the spy genre clichés and more outlandish aspects of the movie work, they do it with a back and forth and push and pull that made me want this movie to do big business so that a sequel could be green lit immediately just to watch them banter with each other for another 2 hours. They’re that good. (Spoiler alert: the film didn’t do that well…*le sigh*)

Of course, the movie is nothing without the third person of the trio, actress Alicia Vikander as Gaby Teller. While Gaby is a bit more reserved and dull in comparison to the over the top personalities of the other two, she brings a necessary sarcasm and tongue in cheek touch to her character that allows her to stand toe to toe with the big boys which in turn allows her character to have several moments in the spotlight rather frequently and independently from Cavill and Hammer as to not be regulated to the typical “damsel in distress” type role.

Another strong point of the movie is the action. Again, something you can never really go wrong with in a Guy Ritchie film and this one doesn’t disappoint. Much like his Sherlock Holmes films, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. has some awesome sequences that are equal parts stylized, brutal, explosive and most importantly fun. The tone of the film, for most of the runtime at least, is very light and breezy, never taking itself too seriously and when the action scenes do come in, they fit in perfectly.

Look at the boat chase scene and tell me that isn’t one of the most fun scenes you’ve seen in recent memory and if you don’t, I’d just have to direct your attention to the first real encounter between Napoleon and Illya in an empty public bathroom or the perfectly odd bonding scene between a drunk Gaby and a very tired Illya or that interrogation scene in the electric chair or…I could go on forever so I’ll just stop now. Seriously though, these frequent scenes really help the movie stand out and make the audience want to spend more time with these characters once the credits begin to roll.

These scenes, coupled with the silliness and perfect chemistry between the leads, really lends this film to being much better than it has any right to be but alas, it does stumble a bit when the movie has to actually, you know, tell a story. I mean it’s not that it’s a bad story, just nothing special and for being such a lighthearted look at the world of espionage, it was kind of jarring for the film to switch gears near the end of the film and abandon all of its strengths to go the route of a poor man’s James Bond flick. Bond, as he is portrayed nowadays at least, is the more serious version of this type of world and when the film veers into that territory it loses itself and all of the good things going for it. It became more about random plot twists and who’s working for who while some city halfway across the world is in peril from being wiped off the face of the Earth by a nuclear device in T-minus 5 minutes and…you get where I’m going with this.

For all of the fun new ways the filmmakers allow us to see this world, it’s a shame that everything boiled down to another cliché ending and story, especially with so much else going for it. Here’s to hoping someone gives this franchise another shot because I would love to see what kind of shenanigans the men (and woman) from U.N.C.L.E. can get themselves into next.