Not much style and absolutely no susbtance

Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill

Not to bang on any more about The Fantastic Four than I did last week, let me just take a moment to talk about the first issue of the comic book which was published in 1961. It starts with a flare being fired into the sky, a crowd of anxious onlookers, and a shadowy figure firing the flare. Within the next three pages all four members of the quartet have been revealed and their powers are on display. Only when we are well and truly in the thick of things – or in media res as they say in screenwriting textbooks - do we get to find out who they are and why they are turning invisible, bursting into flames etc. By that time we are well and truly hooked.

It’s great dramatic story telling which is almost impossible to do in the modern comic book film; it takes more than half the movie for us to see any of their powers in the new FF film for example. This insistence on the origin, the foundation myth, the getting the gang together sequence has become de rigeur for the cookie cutter mentality of the modern comic book movie. I don’t especially like it but I can live with it, however I don’t see the need to take it anywhere else.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the latest big screen incarnation of a Sixties TV hit. The TV show was one of the coolest programmes ever made; the two heroes, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin were American and Russian spies who were working together for a new super organisation called U.N.C.L.E.

Played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum respectively they rode the cool crest of the James Bond wave. And why not? Bond creator Ian Fleming was involved in the creation of the show which brought super spy adventures into your living room on a weekly basis. They had guns, they had girls, they had gadgets, but most of all they had fun.

So why then would you make a big screen version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. without U.N.C.L.E.? The organisation does appear but, literally, over the closing credits. What we have here is an origin story we neither need nor want.

In TV land Solo and Kuryakin were suave, urbane and charming. Robert Vaughn was an established movie star but McCallum was an overnight teen sensation. Young women adored him, young men copied his fashion and his haircut. They were style icons.

So why then would you cast Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer – two of the most charismatically-challenged actors in the business – in these roles? Why also turn Solo into a criminal being blackmailed into his espionage work or, even worse, turn Kuryakin into a psychotic thug with daddy issues prone to violent rages. And worst of all, why would you turn this slick piece of entertainment into a tone-deaf, thick-eared, thud and blunder spy story?

Not only that; it’s a badly done spy story. The plot about a CIA agent and a KGB agent teaming up to stop former Nazis getting a nuclear bomb is dull beyond words. Every line uttered by either man fairly drips with exposition. There’s no characterisation, just information for the chronically hard of thinking which would appear to be their target audience.

Speaking of target demographics, this film seems completely out of synch with the contemporary audience. There’s a lame attempt to explain the Cold War over the credits while the whole film stops for a newsreel montage when one of the villains mentions the Second World War; presumably to convince those who hadn’t heard of it that it was a very bad thing.

As the sort of film maker who likes to remind you he’s there Guy Ritchie directs with his usual vigour, rather like a small child demanding you pay attention to his latest trick. It’s as if constant forward movement will distract from the lack of substance but the direction is so toneless and haphazard that the film has no sense of cohesion. Unlike, for example, the Mission: Impossible franchise The Man from U.N.C.L.E. completely abandons the spirit of the original; it doesn’t even use the original Lalo Schifrin TV theme which was every bit as recognisable in its day as the Mission: Impossible theme, also written by Schifrin.

Obviously Guy Ritchie gets off on Sixties Italian chic, hence the clothes, the locations, and the sub-Morricone score, but despite all that the film ends up looking like an M&S fashion shoot only a bit less interesting.