2015 has been a good year for spy movies. Kingsman was a great reconstruction of old-school James Bond and Melissa Mccarthy's Spy got plenty of mileage out of parodying the genre, and there's still the stoner Jason Bourne flick American Ultra and a new James Bond adventure before the year is out. But of all the stylish cloak and dagger film of 2015, Guy Ritchie's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is probably the straightest. A 21st century update of a well-remembered 60s TV show, it looked to make a splash and stick out by making a conventional Cold War adventure but with a stylistic flair and unique visual aesthetic that harkened back to the colorful spy craze of the 60s but without coming off like a spoof or lazy homage. On that note Ritchie's film succeeds but the story it's telling is very flawed, though not for a lack of trying.
The year is 1963. CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) are both on the trail of East German auto mechanic Gabby Teller (Alicia Vikander). Teller's father is a former Nazi scientist who's gone missing along with his research, a method of enriching uranium so simple it could enable anyone with enough cash to make their own nuclear weapons, and she is both sides only lead. After butting heads while getting Gabby across the Berlin Wall, Solo & Kuryakin's superiors decide to pair the two agents up to track down the missing doctor. The two rival agents, along with Gabby, jet off to Italy to investigate a mysterious female shipping magnate with ties to ex-Nazis and who may be a member of a worldwide criminal organization that has kidnapped Gabby's father. From there, the three engage in a complex spy game to outwit the villain and get the research out of her hands. That's if Solo & Kuryakin can put aside their differences for long enough to work together.
