Lights, Camera, Action! | The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Movie Review)

By Freda Cooper 11.08.2015

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The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (UK Rating: 12A)

Back in the days when The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was compulsory viewing, its squillions of female fans were split into two camps. There were the ones who were crazy for Robert Vaughn's suave American agent, Napoleon Solo, with his sleek dark hair and sharp suits - these tended to be the older fans. The younger ones swooned over David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin, the Russian agent of the combo, with his floppy Beatles-style haircut and more sensitive good looks. Those going to see Guy Ritchie's reboot of the '60s TV hit, which is released in cinemas this Friday, 14th August (and also featured in Talking Pictures this week), will also be split down the middle, but for a very different reason.
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American CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) helps Gaby (Alicia Vikander) escape from East Germany into the West. Her father is a nuclear scientist and she, as well as the US government, need to track him down, but the Russians are interested in him, too, so Solo finds he has to work alongside top CIA agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer). Their challenge is to also rescue Gaby's father from some powerful Italians who want to make use of his latest invention - an atomic bomb.

Not everybody will remember the TV original, so for them this will be a glossy spy caper. For those who can look back to the '60s when the show was a smash on both sides of the Atlantic, this will be… a glossy spy caper… because Ritchie is just using the name and some of the attributes of the series as a peg for the story, one that hopefully will pull in the punters. The names of the two central characters remain the same, they are from the same countries as before, and they have got those nifty '60s guns with silencers, but, after that, the similarities start to fizzle out.


 
Henry Cavill's Napoleon Solo is a near carbon copy of Robert Vaughn's, with his dark hair and smooth manner, but Armie Hammer's Kuryakin is no David McCallum. He's a huge 6ft 5ins, compared to McCallums 5ft 7ins, has close-cut hair and a Russian accent that's almost as impenetrable as an iceberg. As for U.N.C.L.E. (which stands for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement), it only puts in an appearance right at the very end, leaving the door wide open for a follow-up. This, after all, is intended as a prequel, showing how the organisation and its two main agents came together.

As a spy jaunt, minus all the U.N.C.L.E. connections, it's a sharp piece of hokum, done with all the style and sheen expected from Ritchie. He makes great use of the time period's context, resurrecting the split-screen technique so popular at the time on TV, recreating the fashions of the day, and some of the trendy gadgets, as well, such as telephones with dials set in the base - must-haves, but hardly practical.

There is one other similarity with the original: the film doesn't take itself especially seriously, sending up the characters and the genre, with most of the humour coming from the two leads and their mutual distrust. It's a bit hit-and-miss, and the running gag about Kuryakin's huge physique soon runs out of steam, but there's enough laughs to make the film entertaining, as well as easy on the eye.

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6/10
Rated 6 out of 10

Good

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. doesn't bear much resemblance to its original source, but what it lacks in authenticity, it makes up for with panache and a sharp sense of style anchoring it in the 1960s. Is it enough? For younger audiences, as long as they don't mind a lack of substance underneath, it is. Fans of the original spy antics series, though, will feel that Guy Ritchie has played fast and loose with their memories.
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