Guy Ritchie’s spy caper is lovely to look at and there is not much under the suits. The clothes, the cars and Daniel Pemberton’s score do most of the work; the plot and the two leads stand around looking expensive.
Guy Ritchie has taken the 1960s television series back to its beginning, in 1963, with the Berlin Wall still new: an American thief on loan to the CIA and a KGB enforcer end up on the same job. What it wants to be is the early Bond films, with more jokes and better tailoring, and what it manages is the tailoring. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is 116 minutes of handsome people being cool at one another, and we enjoyed about half of it.
The Berlin opening is the film’s most confident stretch. Oliver Scholl builds the East in wet grey and rubble, John Mathieson lights it in sodium orange and gun-metal blue, and Hammer’s Kuryakin chases a car on foot and tears the boot off it. Then Rome, which Mathieson shoots in honey-coloured stone and blue water, and where Joanna Johnston dresses everyone as if a magazine were waiting outside: Vikander in short shifts and big sunglasses, Debicki in white with a helmet of blonde hair, Cavill in suits that never crease. We could have watched the clothes for an hour.
Daniel Pemberton’s score is the best thing in the film. Harpsichord, flutes, a bossa nova shuffle and a drum kit that sounds recorded in a stairwell: it is pastiche, openly, with more swagger than anyone on screen. It carries the one sequence people will remember. Kuryakin is being hunted across a harbour by boats with searchlights, and James Herbert cuts away to Solo, who has fallen off a speedboat, climbed into a parked lorry, found a sandwich and a bottle of wine in the cab, and is eating his supper while the chase goes on through the windscreen behind him. We laughed out loud, properly; it was the one time the film’s cool was a joke at its own expense rather than a pose.
The leads are the trouble, and not because they are bad. Cavill plays Solo with his voice slowed to a drawl, an impression of a leading man; a spy who is never in danger or in want is hard to follow. Hammer has the better part, a Russian with a temper the state has told him to sit on and hands that shake before he hits someone, and a fine line in silent exasperation at Vikander, who is the only one of the three playing a person. The script, by Ritchie and Lionel Wigram, keeps telling us the two men are rivals turning into partners and forgetting to show it. Their best scene together is an argument in a boutique about belts. It is funny, and it is about belts.
Elizabeth Debicki is the other asset. She plays Victoria Vinciguerra with almost no movement, a cigarette, a stare and a voice that has never been raised in its life, and she is more frightening sitting still than the film is when it blows things up. Hugh Grant drifts through as Waverly like a man who has read the script and decided to enjoy himself anyway. The plot concerns a missing scientist, a warhead and a shipping company, and nobody on screen cares about it, so neither did we. The last half hour goes bigger, with jeeps and motorbikes and a fortress, and gets worse. We lost track of who was chasing whom and found we did not mind. Herbert’s trick of replaying each set piece in flashback is sharp twice and a tic by the fourth.
Ritchie has done this before. Sherlock Holmes (2009) used the same tricks, and the pairing underneath had warmth. Here the suits are better and the temperature is lower. The early Bond films it is imitating had something nasty under the glamour; From Russia with Love (1963) is a film in which people get hurt. This is a film in which people get dressed.
We had a pleasant time and had forgotten most of it by the bus stop. That is not nothing; a 12A a parent and a teenager can both laugh at is rarer than it should be. Watch it with the sound up for Pemberton and do not expect to remember the plot.
