Metacritic reviews

If you have a fondness for the genre and a particular love of '60s pop, The Man From UNCLE is the summer's big fizzy drink, all bubbles, and while it may be gone the moment you walk out of the theater, the smile it puts on your face will likely linger.

It succeeds admirably on its own terms – more so, I think, than his two Sherlock Holmes films – and while it never really transcends pastiche, its ambitions don’t lie in that direction.

U.N.C.L.E. has enough style and smarts to make it an amusingly louche summer movie: a cultivated mix of action and wit, suits and cities, that feels refreshingly analogue in a digital world.

This new Man from U.N.C.L.E. would be an instant masterpiece if it were consistently as good as its best parts, but even as a hit-and-miss affair, it’s a bracing bit of late-summer fun for anyone who has given up the notion of a major studio offering anything truly revelatory until at least October.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. plays a like a lower key, vintage edition of a “Mission: Impossible” movie. It’s a good movie with a great look.

Cavill and Hammer have each toplined major tentpoles before, so it’s something of a mystery why neither makes much of an impression here, but there’s a curious vacuum at the center of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. that almost certainly owes to its casting.

The film is nothing but a sensuous rush of snappy period costumes, elegant beauties, dapper men, kinetic action and so-so quips, and because Ritchie seems even less concerned with story than usual, that blinkered approach very nearly works.

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.

How is that Vikander, who played the robot in the recent (and worthwhile) "Ex Machina," was twice as lively and five times as human in that picture than in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?

There’s some nice early-60s period production design and the whole thing moves along smoothly, if unhurriedly. But it never delivers anything like the punch of Tom Cruise’s M:I adventures, nor the wit and distinctiveness of 007.