Review of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) by Filmphonic — 20 Aug 2015

The tongue-in-cheek nature and iconic style of the early “Bond” films is a clear inspiration for Guy Ritchie’s ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’… and the key word here is “style”, the film drips with it and it often overpowers any substance and everything else.

From the clothes, cars and gadgets, to the cinematographic contrast between a dreary divided Cold War Berlin and the vibrant sun-kissed panoramas of southern coastal Italy, great effort has been taken to bring to the screen a sense of style that’s rare in modern Spy films and can only be achieved with a movie that’s heavily anchored in genre and period.

We’ve come to expect a certain level of style from a Guy Ritchie film but without a tour-de-force central performance as in ‘Sherlock Holmes’, or an inventive and engrossing storyline like ‘Snatch’ , the result is an uneven film that although entertaining, offers little to an oversubscribed genre.

Aside from the obligatory opening action sequence, ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”features a slow-build first half that tries to infuse the characters and story with a comic tone which harks back to early “Bond”, with limited success, when the story and action picks-up, the film then changes tone to your typical modern Spy action film and any charm evaporates as the tension and action set-pieces ramp up.

Despite the lack of an engaging storyline or real chemistry between the two leads, not to mention the adequate if unmemorable performances from the rest of the cast, ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ has more than mere stylistic merits, managing to re-introduce a period in history which cemented the very notion of a Spy into the popular consciousness and that established the entire “Spy” sub-genre… and it looks good while doing so.

The Bottom Line….

Meticulously stylish, faithfully nostalgic and moderately entertaining, ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ takes the Spy sub-genre full-circle back to its roots while offering nothing particularly new, Warner Bros. will surely be hoping that Guy Ritchie has ignited a franchise to trouble the “Bond’s” and “Bourne’s” of this world.