The Man From U.N.C.L.E
The latest chapter of the 60’s revival - summer movies - The Man From U.N.C.L.E is now showing in a theater near you. Hold on to your patooties, it’s time for another trip to the time of mod clothes, no personal electronics, cold war spies and big conspiracies. In this one, we have a prequel to the TV series of the same name, the setup of the two main characters, Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) and the introduction of a third, Gabby Teller (Alicia Vikander), presumably for some gender balance. Written and directed by Guy Ritchie, TMU holds to the tradition of that time, having larger-than-life villains with world-threatening schemes.
In this case, the latest threat to the world is some post-Nazi bad guys who have a lot of smuggled Nazi gold and a scientist (Gabby’s father in fact) who have cooked up a recipe to make quick, cheap nuclear weapons. The CIA and the KGB are not on speaking terms, but both are scared sh*tless about this. They have arranged to have a link-up between the CIA’s soldier-turned-superart-thief Napoleon Solo and the KGB’s super-soldier Illya Kuryakin. Both want plausible deniability so the plan to have them work together is an even bigger secret. Gabby (from British Intelligence) is the link between the two of them.
The villain, in this case is, Victoria (Elizabeth Debicki), a slinky, well dressed viper of a woman, who is using everybody else to get her evil clutches on the plan for the bomb. As you probably expect, there is a big chase scene, people are knocked on the head or drugged and the most high tech gadget is a device with an antenna that makes funny noises. Oh, and by the way, in a major blooper, the cast keeps referring to the plans for the bomb as being on a “computer disk”, while it’s plainly visible that the object being referred to is a tape reel, but, I’m guessing that the writers assumed that younger viewers would not know what a tape reel is….right? It’s a strange blooper…I’m not old enough to have direct experience, but I know what a horse and buggy is so I’m guessing that a 16 year old would know what a tape reel is, especially in a movie that’s so full of retro-references. Another curiosity is the choice of a Nazi named Teller (father of Victoria) as the inventor of this bomb. As we know, one of the most well known defected scientists on the American bomb project was Hungarian Edward Teller, who definitely was NOT a post Nazi criminal. Why they chose this name when they could have picked something suitably German and neutral like Schmidt baffled me.
As you probably expect in a summer movie, characters are of the sort that can be fleshed out in a MacDonald’s commercial, dialog is minimal and clipped and the plot is predictable. The world has to continue at the end, otherwise how could there ever have been the TV series that this movie sets up? That’s always the problem with a prequel…you know right up front how it will end, in this case with a partnership between Solo and Kuryakin AND, the organization known as U.N.C.L.E.
Nevertheless, the movie is fairly entertaining. It drags sometimes, but it keeps moving fast enough to remind you that it’s summer. The amount of digital rendering is relatively small, since all of the cloak and dagger stuff is 60’s stye…no technology more advanced that a walkie-talkie and a tape reel (not a disk); no spacecraft or resurrected dinosaurs, but with plenty of car chases, even a slow-motion one with with the dreaded East German Trabants. My favorite part was the 60’s clothing and decor re-creation, women wearing those mod dresses with plastic mushroom shaped hats with little visors and guys with perfect “Mad Men” suits and hair. My other favorite re-creation is a race track scene with 60’s formula one cars. One car that passes by (not a formula one) is the current most expensive car in the world, a Ferrari GTO from the mid-sixties, which makes a cameo. These things are worth more than the budget of this movie, about 150 million. Nobody is going to take home any acting Oscars for this and the direction is pretty much by-the-numbers, but it’s not too bad for what it is, a retro exercise, well populated with period elements and a plot that makes you nostalgic for the good old days of the Cold War.
