The Guardian Review: "Style paired with deathly boring substance"

Peter Bradshaw

Tuesday 11 August 2015 06.00 BST

Guy Ritchie has revamped the 60s TV spy caper The Man From UNCLE with co-screenwriter and co-producer Lionel Wigram, adding sex interest and machoising any residual hint of camp, but slathering the whole thing in lugubrious, self-indulgent men’s-mag type tailoring and style in various photoshoot Euro locations. Inevitably, he’s offering an “origin myth” account of this international secret-agent team. There’s some nice early-60s period production design and the whole thing moves along smoothly, if unhurriedly. But it never delivers anything like the punch of Tom Cruise’s M:I adventures, nor the wit and distinctiveness of 007. And the two male leads, Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer, are fantastically dull and uncharismatic, with all the sexy danger of a pair of M&S men’s underwear models, easily upstaged by their cheerfully pert co-star Alicia Vikander. And in fact all three are entirely outclassed by an airy cameo from Hugh Grant as the dry British intelligence chief Waverly, giving one-and-all an object lesson in scene-stealing.

The original had its détente pairing of US spy Napoleon Solo, played by the lean-faced Robert Vaughn, and the blond Soviet Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum. Now it’s Cavill as Solo, that Superman kiss curl always threatening to assert itself. He’s a US agent in cold war Berlin, often wearing a stuffy and uncomfortable-looking three-piece suit, on the trail of a missing nuclear scientist whose lush daughter Gaby (Vikander) is improbably working there as a car mechanic. It’s a preposterous skill which is never really needed, except when she suggests tuning up a racing car in one scene. Maybe this got lost in the edit.

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