"Funner" With Frank

Question: What do you call a major motion picture (based on a beloved 1960s spy television series which featured a killer title score) that uses none of that iconic, propulsive, jazzy music anywhere in the film?

Answer: Of course, you call it THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (2015) which I watched for the first time yesterday. I like this film. I like it a lot. But I sat through every minute of the film and the end credits hoping to hear even just a snippet from Jerry Goldsmith’s score from the series. There is an extremely short blink-and-you-miss-it moment when Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) is turning the dial on a car radio and momentarily picks up a few notes from a background track from the series. That’s it.

I don’t know if, for some reason, the producers couldn’t get the rights to the music from the series and had to go with original music that leans heavily into mid-century Italian pop songs, U.N.C.L.E-esque jazz music and, inexplicably, several cues that are lifted directly form Ennio Morricone’s scores for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. It’s not a deal breaker by any means but ask yourself if Tom Cruise’s enormously popular and financially successful MISSON: IMPOSSIBLE franchise would be near as much fun to watch without the use of Lalo Schifrin’s immortal score.

The film, set in 1963, is an U.N.C.L.E. origin story. Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill, channeling his inner Robert Vaughn) is a world class thief being used in Europe as a CIA asset. Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) is a KGB agent with anger management issues. The two unite in a tense alliance to stop a Nazi scientist from delivering a nuclear weapon to an unnamed (though it’s obviously THRUSH) criminal organization.

By the end of the film, Solo and Kuryakin are under the command of Alexander Waverly, played by Hugh Grant. Ironically, if a MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. movie had been filmed some twenty years earlier, Grant would have been a lock for the role of Solo. The code name U.N.C.L.E. is finally used in the final scene.

I have no problems with the back stories of Solo and Kuryakin. Nothing about their respective pasts was ever mentioned on the show, so this material cannot contradict anything established as canon.

The good things about the film: the two leads look great, and Solo is nothing less than sartorial perfection throughout. The women are beautiful and the scenery is spectacular. On the show, whenever a foreign local was needed for a story, a still of the city with a super-imposed name would identify the setting. However, wherever the action was supposed to be taking place, it was always the MGM back lot. The series never took its production crew anywhere outside of Southern California. The film takes us from West and East Germany to Italy and there are a ton of great sights along the way.

One little thing that I really liked was whenever characters are speaking in a foreign language, the yellow subtitles are in the same font as that used on the television show. It’s a nice little touch.

Sadly, there’s never a mention of any kind of an “affair” going on. It would have been easy for someone (probably Napoleon) to quip something about the “Nazi Nuke Affair” or something similar.

I like Director Guy Ritchie’s work here although he does get a little showy at times. He splinters the action at the climatic raid on a private island into a series of split screens which speeds up the action without having to stage a huge action set piece.

Is THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. perfect? No. It’s not at the level of the best of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films but it is far and away better than such cinematic turds as THE AVENGERS and THE WILD, WILD WEST. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would gladly pay to see a second installment in the franchise.

Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon as the film didn’t generate enough of a profit to warrant a sequel. Still and all, what we have is a 1960s spy thriller that looks and sounds great. It’s pure escapism that will make you glad you decided to “open Channel D”.

Recommended.