“Given the ugly hash he’d previously made of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective in two misconceived, cluttered and cacophonous features, the last thing I expected from Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was anything that could be remotely described as visual wit or elegance. But maybe even more so in this age, when bloated and degraded blockbusters are the multitudinous coins of the realm, a big-budget spy picture conceived initially as just another nostalgic cash cow has the capacity to surprise us when it looks to classic forms and attitudes not as something to be slavishly, crassly replicated but instead to be used as a comment on where the genre is now, and why it’s so often no longer as much as fun as it could be. Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies missed the point entirely by failing to trust that modern audiences could respond to Doyle’s characters without being bashed over the head with superfluous technique. But in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. he’s figured out a way to make technique speak and interact with the story, to use visual flourishes and strategies to enhance the comedy and the thrills that are part of the genre his movie lives in.
“This new U.N.C.L.E. exists squarely in the Cold War of the ‘60s, the same era over which James Bond presided—the series on which the movie is based was one of TV’s many responses to the phenomenon of 007—but it’s no relentless nod to fans of the show or a simple spot-the-cultural-touchstone joke-fest. (I confess to grooving on the appearance of a completely awesome Cobra rotary phone at one point, however.) Ritchie’s movie is fast-paced and modern, but at the same time, in its use of split-screen effects, its fealty to fashion as an element of its world to be enhanced and not simply parodied, its evocative score and implementation of smartly integrated but less familiar period pop, and its healthy respect for a classical style which respects the design of action and prizes the orientation of its audience within that action, it feels as if it could have been made in the ‘60s.
“There are individual sequences that can stand with some of the funniest and most breathtaking action ever staged—for instance, a car chase choreographed like an ice-skating duet that must have had Remy Julienne grinning from ear to ear while simultaneously stewing in envy. And Ritchie has learned buckets from Warner Bros.’ Termite Terrace geniuses in the area of background action— the second half of a spectacular boat chase speeds past the windshield of a truck (and our field of vision) inside which Napoleon Solo, oblivious to the aquatic action, regards a delicious sandwich and bottle of wine he’s found inside. Similarly, a nasty villain gets cooked by the faulty wiring of his own electric chair while, in the foreground and on the other side of soundproof glass, Solo and Ilya Kuriyakin debate the morality of turning the torturer’s methods on himself. Oops! Best of all, the siege-by-machine-gun of an aircraft carrier where a villainous nuclear threat is being developed has been brilliantly telescoped into zippy shorthand, a multi-screen barrage of color and sound in which individual frames glide and sweep and plummet throughout the Panavision frame with graphic insouciance and flair. In a brief couple of minutes Ritchie and his editors create a sharp and lively blast of coherent action, a bridge to the really good stuff, which most 21st-century action directors would have expanded into time-killing tedium.
“There is so much to enjoy in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., certainly including its actors, that it’s an even greater shame audiences more or less stayed away— Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer spar on everything from fashion to technology to nationalism with unexpected grace and humor, while Alicia Vikander, Sylvester Groth, Elizabeth Debecki, Hugh Grant and Jared Harris all have presence and individual moments of relish and style worthy of their talent and the conception of the movie as a whole. However, those tepid box office returns have all but assured that a franchise which could have been relished by those of us who have little use for the grim self-seriousness that has overtaken the Bond pictures will never come to pass. Be grateful, then, that this one somehow made it out of the factory, in no small part due to the guiding hand of Guy Ritchie, perhaps the least likely director ever to point a Panavision camera in the direction of this sort of swift, feather-light, presumably antiquated and thoroughly delightful good time.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
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