I felt next to nothing last night as I watched Guy Ritchie‘s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (Warner Bros., 8.7) with a crowd of second-string, all-media loser types at the Arclight. I didn’t “hate” it and I’ll admit that I chuckled two or three times, but I mostly felt anesthetized — suspended in the tepid depths of the thing. The screenplay (written by Ritchie and Lionel Wigram) delivers a form of dry meta-comedy mixed with the same old running-around-Europe action spy stuff, but I have to acknowledge that stylistically and attitudinally it’s up something that’s lightly skewed — an aloof cool-cat vibe that sets it apart from the usual usual. The problem is that this stuff doesn’t kick in very often.
(l. to r.) Alicia Vikander, Army Hammer, Henry Cavill in Guy Ritchie’s
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
About halfway through I was thinking about hitting the head but I talked myself out of it for fear of missing something (a good joke, a clever bit). If you put off a bathroom break it doesn’t mean that a film is necessarily stupendous, but it does suggest it might be doing something half-right.
And yet U.N.C.L.E. is a kind of light genre comedy with a split personality. On one hand it seems to despise action-flick conventions by ironically satirizing them and making dry little jokes, and on the other it subjects the audience to the same formulaic bullshit that you’ve seen in a hundred spy movies.
I was also telling myself that I like Henry Cavill‘s Napoleon Solo. He’s cool to hang with for his good looks and take-it-easy vibe, but mainly because of his droll, meta-blase way of saying his lines. He’s adapting to the basic meta attitude, of course, but I felt relaxed when he was in the room. I also admired Cavill’s performance in Man of Steel, despite having despised the film. I was saying to myself, “We need more guys like Cavill in movies and fewer schlumpies and dumpies.” Cavill just has to be careful to avoid that flirting-with-Ernest-Borgnine look that he exhibited last year at ComicCon.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. contains three scenes that exude an amusingly detached “humor” element. The quotes mean “not exactly funny but enough to make you grin slightly.”