The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Director:
Guy Ritchie
Writers:
Guy Ritchie, Lionel Wigram, Jeff Kleeman, David C. Wilson
Starring:
Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Debicki
Rating:
Four stars out of five.
Available
in theaters now.
Shooting
an action sequence is difficult. Parts and humans are moving,
multiple cameras are running simultaneously, pyrotechnics have to be
perfectly timed, CGI has to be anticipated, and more things go into
it. Filmmakers typically have to make the sequences look seamless,
too.
One of
the neatest things about director Guy Ritchie's The Man from
U.N.C.L.E. is that the difficulty of those action sequences –
and there are many – is right there in the open. Ritchie employs a
split-screen effect several times to show every angle of an action
beat. The how of these scenes is important to Ritchie, and he
dives into them with aplomb.
Taking
cues from Brian De Palma – one of the great visual stylists –
Ritchie puts it all on the screen for the audience to digest. We see
the Cold War henchmen as they assemble, coordinate movements, get
hit, shot, and more. This all happens while our heroes, an American
just suave enough to avoid total cheeseball status, Napoleon Solo
(Henry Cavill), and Soviet loose cannon Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer)
team up, make disdainful faces at each other and those men who would
have them killed, and let their elite spy training take over,
displaying both their innovative sides and their inefficiencies,
allowing for the other to correct and complement. With the
split-screen in effect, every aspect of this happens in what appears
to be real time. The audience is privy to the elements that make up
these moments, from second to second.
For much
of the movie, Ritchie handles the why of things well, too,
even if they are on the nose in their thematic cleverness. Cavill's
Solo is brash, never lacking in confidence that he will get the job
done – fitting that he represents early '60s America before Vietnam
went south. Hammer's Kuryakin is all negative reinforcement, a
leashed dog who wants out of his situation, but he can't get that
because his handlers will throw him in a gulag if he does not
succeed. That each man is forced to work together to preserve their
respective governments' pride is a fun – if not exactly nuanced or
even factually correct – way of saying that the Cold War, in the
end, was all about preventing nuclear explosions around the
world.
And so
Solo and Kuryakin trade put-downs as a way of saving face, ignoring
that there are more people in the world than themselves (and the
people they represent). Enter Alicia Vikander's Gaby, an East German
auto mechanic whose scientist father had been forced to work on the
Nazis' nuclear program two decades earlier. He has been kidnapped and
coerced again into building a bomb for the film's villain, Elizabeth
Debicki's Victoria. Solo is tasked with smuggling Gaby out of East
Germany so they can use her to get to her father.
Gaby is
obviously far more brilliant and capable than the two reluctant
partners in spying can allow themselves to see. But for the audience,
the “reveal” is clear as day long before it happens – for Solo
and Kuryakin, though, it's a shock. And it's all part of Ritchie's
clever way of putting the obvious in front of the viewer, not trying
to be a magician and distract. He's saying, “Here it is, I hope you
like it.”
And
Vikander's portrayal of Gaby is what gets you to like it. Yes, her
accent – Vikander is Swedish – can be spotty. Gaby is able to
play the grown-up when the situation calls for it. In a mugging
orchestrated by the villains to out Kuryakin as a spy, Gaby
(portraying his fiancé for the
mission) calms him and forces him to swallow his pride for the sake
of achieving their goal. It is her cold and hilarious solution that
drives the resolution of the plot.
But
mostly, when she is able to let her hair down, she gives the movie
its heart. She does this goofy, drunken dance to Solomon Burke's “Cryto Me” that might rival the choreographed dance Oscar Isaac does in
another
Vikander-starring
movie from this year, Ex
Machina. It's so silly
and shot as a classic Simpsons
sight gag, all
happening in the background while Kuryakin plays chess, trying to
ignore her. She has a Chaplin-style wobbliness to her movement during
the dance, making it the perfect way to dislodge Kuryakin from his
rigid sense of never having fun.
It's
a welcome moment of genuine levity at a time when the script comes
close to going off the rails with jokes and wordplay that are too
clever by half. Lines that should play like satire instead come off
as just on the wrong side of smug, a too-obvious way of saying, “How
silly we are for fighting because we would be so much better off if
we worked together!” That's a fine theme and Ritchie explores it
well in the action sequences, but it can be a little too much when
spoken so plainly by the actors.
Luckily,
Vikander and the action snap the movie back into place and it zooms
to a conclusion. It has fun pulling the rug out from the audience
with an action scene that would be the climax of 99 percent of other
movies, but instead only puts the pieces in place for the real
resolution.
And
in the end, The Man
from U.N.C.L.E. is the
right kind of summer popcorn entertainment. It has some light social
commentary going on and performances filled with charm, but generally
it's a flick dedicated to crafting a fine piece of visual
entertainment.
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