“You two are supposed to be looking after one another. Why am I playing mother?” Gaby (Alicia Vikander) casts a stern look in the direction of CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer), squabbling over who’s in charge of their secret mission. Namely, they’re looking for Gaby’s father, an East German nuclear physicist, apparently kidnapped so that he might design a bomb.
Standing on a street in Berlin, the men are briefly struck by Gaby’s upset and so briefly pause their chest-puffing when she threatens to walk away. Living inside The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which is to say, Guy Ritchie’s movie update of the mid-’60s TV show, all three are caught up in kitschy templates, including Napoleon’s insufferable arrogance, Illya’s brutal vulnerability, and Gaby’s colorful mini-dresses. Their roles ordain that the movie is low on surprises and high on clichés, including those on display right here: not only do the boys need to be mothered, but the movie also needs to point that out so that you’re assured that the movie is arch and clever, instead of just unoriginal.
But it’s that, too. For all its archness and cleverness, for all its showy self-awareness, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. can’t come up with a new idea. Recycling a TV show that famously recycled James Bond, the film adds in buddy movie clichés, action movie clichés, gangster movie clichés, and of course, Guy Ritchie movie clichés (fast cuts, freeze frames, two bits set inside one frame, one close and one far). Framed by such predictable excess, the flimsy plot doesn’t stand a chance.
At first glance, that plot centers on the boys’ evolving relationship, with the girl included to make sure you’re clear that the boys are not gay (at least not in relation to each other). They come together during an opening gambit, when Napoleon means to bring Gaby over to the West and Illya means to stop him. The superhuman Russian chases their car on foot along dark night streets, they shoot and careen and fight by hand. While their contest is predicated on who has hold of Gaby, they all learn late in the next scene that they’ve been set up on something like a blind date, as their spy agencies want them to work together in order to thwart the couple who have commissioned the bomb, a wealthy Italian race car driver named Alexander (Luca Calvani) and wife Victoria (Elizabeth Debicki). The plan is that the “little chop shop girl”. as Illya likes to call Gaby, will convince her dad to come along once they locate him.
It’s a sloppy plan, as these things go, nothing like the intricate stylings of Mission Impossible. Rather, the rudimentary set-up allows for all manner of barely connected hijinks, including fights on the street (see the scene where Gaby complains about having to mother the men), car chases, visits to racetracks, and sensual romps in hotel rooms. These set pieces mostly have to do with Illya and Napoleon’s bonding process, whereby each saves the other’s neck and so they begrudgingly respect and then even sort of like one another. In this, the agents embody a larger backdrop, that the CIA and KGB might collaborate, however unhappily or however awkwardly.
No matter the common reality of such backroom collaborations, as agencies and governments work around long term hostilities to achieve short term goals, the jokey gimmick here is premised on the absurdity of ideological fronting. Here everyone has the same end in mind, power and control, with Illya, Napoleon, and Gaby each engaged in their own version of that pursuit. A onetime thief whose skills made him worthy of employ by the CIA, Napoleon’s “light fingers” and cocky attitude make him an apt representative for American values, so-called, which is to say, he tends to lord over the others his intelligence and leadership.
At the same time, Illya’s troubled background (something to do with his mother) leaves him ever teetering on a psychotic break, signaled by his fist clenching in close-up, ostensibly explains his genius for violence and perhaps for his occasional service as the team’s tech. (It doesn’t explain a scene in a bathroom when he beats up a trio of Italian kids, a scene that, cut in with Napoleon’s bedding of another lady, looks a lot like a bunch of pretty boys throwing down over who’s “most macho” when they’re really worried about who’s least.)
It’s not a little tedious that the third team member, Gaby, is left to cover the usual girls’ province, sex. Posing as Illya’s fiancée (while he poses as an architect and Napoleon is something else, maybe a suave playboy), Gaby develops a crush on him, and as she becomes frustrated with his lack of coherent attention (for he does return the interest, but is just too naïve or perhaps too nearly psychotic to act on it properly), she drinks too much (one drink = instantly drunk) or acts out in other ways.
You understand that Gaby is a take on a cliché and not a straight cliché, that The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is tongue in cheek. But still, it’s slow going. For a Guy Ritchie movie, that may be the saddest thing to say.