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Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill try, and fail, to get some zing out of The Man From UNCLE |
Director: Guy Richie
Cast: Henry Cavill (Napoleon Solo), Armie Hammer (Ilya
Kuryakin), Alicia Vikander (Gaby Teller), Elizabeth Debicki (Victoria
Vinciguerra), Jared Harris (Adrian Sanders), Hugh Grant (Alexander Waverly),
Luca Calvani (Alexander Vinciguerra), Sylvester Groth (Uncle Rudi), Christian
Berkel (Udo Teller), Misha Kuznetsov (Oleg)
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
was a 1960s TV spy caper series, which I confess I’ve never seen an episode of
but I’m reliably told (by my wife who has) that it’s all larks and fun. This
Guy Ritchie remake, on the other hand, is a tonal mess that has no idea what
the hell it is. Only Hugh Grant gets anywhere near to appearing in a caper
movie – probably because he’s virtually the only member of the cast who might
have grown up watching the original series.
Anyway, in the early 1960s Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) is
an international master-thief turned CIA agent (this suggests his character is
a whole lot more fun than he actually is). Ilya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) is a
KGB super-agent, dealing with issues of psychosis (yup more fun to be had
there). This odd couple are ordered to team up and work with car mechanic (no
seriously) Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), whose father is working with renegade
Italian fascists, led by femme fatale Victoria Viniciguerra (Elizabeth
Debicki), to build a new nuclear mastery over the world. Or something.
It should be a ridiculous, overblown, mix of Bond and high
60s camp. Instead it’s dreary, chemistry-free, largely uninvolving sub-Mission: Impossible high jinks that I’m
not ashamed to say I dozed off during at one point. Would that I had slept
through more of it. It's quite damning when the most enjoyable thing about it is thinking about the accent Olympics going on (we have a Brit playing an American, an American playing a Russian, a Swede playing a German, an Australian playing an Italian, an Irishman playing an American...).
No matter which way the three leads are arranged, Cavill,
Vikander and Hammer have no chemistry at all in any combination. There is
precisely zero bromance between the two leads. Vikander and Hammer have a
will-they-won’t-they romance that comes from absolutely nowhere and leads
nowhere (set up for sequels that will never come). Cavill looks the part, but
completely lacks the cheeky, self-confident, “I’m-enjoying-all-this” charm that
the part requires – instead he’s flat and boring. Hammer has more of the
winking-at-the-camera cool, but he’s saddled with a part that frequently requires
him to burst out in hotel-room-trashing outbursts of anger. Vikander just looks
a bit bored with the whole thing.
These rather joyless characters go through a series of
action set pieces, none of which got my pulse racing, and all of which felt like
off cuts from a lousy Mission: Impossible
sequel. Car chases, fisticuffs, gun fights, explosions, boat chases – they all
tick by with no wit or pleasure involved anywhere. In these sort of things, you
need to feel the characters are such adrenaline junkies that they sorta enjoy
the crazy antics they get thrown into – you don’t get any of that from these
three.
Much as I like Elizabeth Debicki, she can do little with her
underwritten part – I mean I get that the plot isn’t the main thing in a film like
this, but they could have at least given our villain a character. Instead she
is as cardboard cut-out as the rest of the storyline. The acting from the bulk
of the cast is also really odd – some seem aware they are in a tongue-in-cheek
spy film, others seem to think they are in an espionage thriller. It’s a mess. There
are scenes of pratfall comedy followed by grim scenes of torture and violence.
In one juddering moment of this spy romp, the
flipping Holocaust is dragged in as a shorthand for identifying a character
as an “ultimate villain” – which given he had our hero strapped to a chair and
was about to torture him, I think we could all have worked out without
exploiting genocide. Anyone else think pulling this appalling real world event
(with photos!) into a stupid caper movie is really tasteless? Did no one watch
this thing while it was being edited?
I will say the design is pretty good and it’s well shot. But
compare this to the fun and games of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films (which this is obviously trying to emulate)
and the total lack of chemistry at its heart becomes immediately clear. Hugh
Grant is a complete relief when he turns up as he’s the only actor who actually
looks like he is enjoying his part and wants to be there. It was a big box
office bomb and it’s no surprise. No one is having fun, the spirit of the
original series seems to have been completely lost, and the lead actors totally
fail to bring the leading-man pizzazz the film needs. Perfect if you want a
nap.
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