Guy Ritchie has always made buddy action movies, from the ducking and diving of his breakout Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels to the Sherlock films. So the British director seems a good fit for the big-screen upgrade of one of the most popular TV shows of the 1960s, a spy drama with a light touch and two heroes for the price of one.
Not for U.N.C.L.E. the brooding spy out in the cold; here we have yin and yang secret agents, a Yank and a Russian overcoming their Cold War differences to combat international villainy. The show made stars of Robert Vaughn and David McCallum as, respectively, the suave American Napoleon Solo and his more intense Russian partner Illya Kuryakin. Like Bond, their adventures were populated by gadgets, beautiful women and an evil organisation to focus their attentions, hilariously named T.H.R.U.S.H. They also had each other, in a platonic way of course (this was 1960s America, after all) and the double act worked a treat with audiences.
With the recent resurgence of Bond and Smiley, it makes sense to return to U.N.C.L.E. Ritchie and co-writer Lionel Wigram offer new audiences an origin story, revealing how these CIA and KGB agents initially join forces. The British actor Henry Cavill (the current Superman) becomes Solo, the American Armie Hammer (The Social Network, The Lone Ranger) Kuryakin. They’ve got some pretty big shoes to fill.
It's set in 1963. An entertaining sequence in East Berlin introduces the two spies to each other, before they team up and fly to Rome with a woman, feisty German car mechanic Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), whose missing father is thought to be designing nuclear weapons for a group of old Nazis and Fascists who have moved into the arms business.
Ritchie's strengths as a writer and director lie in narrative trickery (he likes to throw us a curve ball in the plot, then reel things back so that we can see both his characters' and his own sleight of hand) and in contrived and rigorously orchestrated set pieces. The standout sequences here are a car chase in Berlin, which introduces the spies (Solo all laid-back calm and ingenuity, Kuryakin power and determination) and a speedboat chase, during which Solo takes a time out for some vino, a sandwich and a listen to an Italian crooner on the radio, before rejoining the action with a splash that takes the breath away.
But U.N.C.L.E. fundamentally depends on chemistry, and here Ritchie hasn’t helped his actors with some occasionally clunky dialogue (usually involving their endless rivalry) and, in a strange way, by the way he’s dressed them – Cavill far too stiff in his Saville Row suits, Hammer in flat cap and casual clothes that make him seem like he’s having a day off from the collective farm. Cavill demonstrates a nice, dry delivery, and Hammer is sweet in his awkwardly romantic moments with Vikander (who fares much better with her Mary Quant-like 1960s fashions). Yet the partnership itself doesn’t really spark into life.
Maybe that’s the point, that these two guys are getting to know each other; though it’s more likely that the actors themselves need more time, a better wardrobe and a more nimble script. We’ll almost certainly get a chance to find out. This has sequel written all over it, signposted by the late cameo by Hugh Grant as Waverly, the eventual head of U.N.C.L.E. It Girl Vikander, a trifle shrill here but oozing personality, deserves to join them; though if she does, the always inexact title would become even more out of place.
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