Review Roundup: THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. Gets Revamped for the Big Screen

Henry Cavill stars in the newest action-comedy, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. The film was directed by Guy Ritchie who co-wrote the screenplay with Lionel Wigram.

In the early 1960s, a CIA agent and a KGB operative join forces in a mission against a mysterious criminal agency that is working to increase production of nuclear weapons. Armie Hammer, Hugh Grant, Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Debicki and Luca Calvani star alongside Henry Cavill.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: Guy Ritchie makes the kind of enjoyably disreputable movies that are fun to watch until they're not. He's a talented flimflam artist and, for the industry, I imagine, a useful one because of how he glosses up schlocky, sketchy projects (his "Sherlock Holmes" movies and other hyperkinetic baubles), making them seem as if there's more to their slick surfaces than naked commercialism, agency fees and facile pleasure. It works for him (he keeps getting hired), and sometimes also for us. Pleasure is, after all, rarely overrated, including in the often mind-bludgeoning arena of franchise cinema, and there's a lot to be said for watching beautiful people doing very silly stuff on screen.

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Have you noticed that the past is effing everywhere? Especially at the movies. Look at The Man From U.N.C.L.E., a moldy 1960s TV series that comes to the screen with no Mission: Impossible update or makeover. That's right - it's still moldy. But in a good way. Mostly. Director Guy Ritchie (Snatch,Sherlock Holmes) is dishing out the same Cold War spycraft audiences ate up when James Bond was a pup. The TV series was so hot that Sally Draper was seen masturbating to it on Mad Men. Will today's Sallys be turned on? Ritchie tries his damnedest, having to stay in period (the film is a prequel to the TV show) but juicing up the action, sex and silliness.

Peter Debruge, Variety: Whatever tough-guy notion of 1960s masculinity Robert Vaughn and David McCallum once embodied as reluctantly paired Cold War rivals has clearly gone the way of the Berlin Wall in the otherwise retro-flavored "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.," a PG-13-rated loose-nukes caper whose target audience is too young to remember the classic spy show that inspired it - much less the once-frosty deadlock between American capitalism and Soviet communism that pits its distractingly handsome leading men against one another. Starring Henry Cavillas American art thief Napoleon Solo and Armie Hammer as KGB operative Illya Kuryakin,Guy Ritchie's latest feels more suave and restrained than his typically hyperkinetic fare, trading rough-and-tumble attitude for pretty-boy posturing. And though the pic is solidly made, its elegant vintage flavor simply doesn't feel modern enough to cut through the tough summer competition. Those seeking stylish spies will surely wait for "Spectre" or that promised "Kingsman" sequel instead.

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair: Sharp casting, well-pitched humor, and a keen instinct for when to wink and when to stay straight-faced all conspire to make The Man from U.N.C.L.E. something far livelier and groovier than anticipated. Maybe this is just glowing praise born out of basement-level low expectations, but I foundU.N.C.L.E.'s bouncy vibe to be an utter delight. I left the theater, on a gray, humid Tuesday morning, feeling lifted out of the dog-days doldrums that tend to settle in mid-August. And you know what? That'll do just fine for now.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: Ritchie is a director whose recent Sherlock Holmes adventures with Robert Downey Jr showed that he could still deliver entertaining, high-octane films. These virtues are absent here, and the prospect of more UNCLE films like this makes me worry that the bad guys are releasing nerve-paralysis gas into cinemas inducing symptoms identical to fatal boredom.

Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post: Although the film has ambitions of honoring the TV spy series on which it's based, it fails to evoke any of that show's 1960s cool. It's a creaky, bloated simulacrum of the groovy past, where it should be a quick, slick and debonair re-imagining of it. Forget beauty and brains. This "U.N.C.L.E." is not just decrepit, but ugly and dumb.

Kyle Smith, New York Post: Only an energetic chase at the end, a multigenre musical score and Hugh Grant, as a Brit of dubious loyalty, partially redeem the film. It falls to Grant to deliver the one funny line, after Solo executes what he thinks is a debonair move: "I watched your trick with the tablecloth. Were you once a waiter?"

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: So the movie, directed by British genre hack Guy Ritchie ("Sherlock Holmes") with his usual flair for style and no substance, follows suit. Cavill seems to be doing an impersonation of a voiceover pitchman for Aqua Velva after shave. Hammer forgot the lesson of his ill-fated "The Lone Ranger": a title alone doesn't make a movie. Their chemistry, like the movie's banal villains, disappears while you're watching.

Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly: Long on style but short on substance, Guy Ritchie's ring-a-ding-ding Cold War spy thriller attempts to resurrect a mothballed '60s TV series the way that Mission: Impossible did. It doesn't work this time.

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: 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.

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