The Bottom Line
Not bad, but not good enough.
Opens
August 14 (Warner Bros.)
Cast
Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Debicki
Director
Guy Ritchie

As U.S.-Russian relations go, so, apparently, goes the temperature of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which means that this big-screen revival of the once-hot TV series of the mid-1960s is being served lukewarm. Set during the Cold War and stoked by seductive settings and an equally attractive cast, this would-be Warner Bros. franchise starter gets everything about half-right; conceptually it's got a few things going for it and it's not unenjoyable to sit through, but at the same time, the tone and creative register never feel confident and settled. It's not bad but not quite good enough either. That U.N.C.L.E. was a popular TV show a half-century ago means nothing to young modern audiences, so late summer box-office prospects would appear modest.
For at least the first two of its four seasons , The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was the coolest thing on American network television. Co-conceived by Ian Fleming and originally titled Ian Fleming's Solo just as Bond mania was taking off at the time of Goldfinger, the show nonchalantly paired American and Russian agents working for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement to defeat T.H.R.U.S.H., a sinister organization bent on the usual: global destruction and dominance. Robert Vaughn's Napoleon Solo was the dashing, dark-haired, well-dressed womanizer, while David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin, black turtlenecked and his blond hair worn long, Beatles-style, was the more inward, hard-to-reach heartthrob.
Rather less anachronistically than he recreated late Victorian London in his irksome but popular Sherlock Holmes duo, director and co-writer Guy Ritchie vividly guns the initial action with a wild car chase in the vicinity of an elaborate recreation of Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie in 1963. Coming at each other from rival sides are Solo and Kuryakin , who's specifically identified as Ukrainian but is no less fanatically committed to the Motherland.
Their mutual object of desire is a beautiful East German auto mechanic (a wonderfully absurd contradiction in terms and no doubt a cinematic first) known as Gaby Teller , whose father is a renegade Nazi known to have been Hitler's favorite rocket expert. Solo smoothly captures her first, but Kuryakin furiously nips at their heels during a protracted nocturnal pursuit conducted in Eastern European automobiles, another witty touch given the notorious sluggishness of communist bloc vehicles.