spies

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025)

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Even more so than fellow bloviators Luca Guadagnino and Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino is mostly in the business of pitching movies these days, as opposed to actually making them. There have been so many Deadline press releases covering Tarantino’s unrealized projects over the years that they’ve justified their own Wikipedia page, ranging from recent hits like his hyper-violent Star Trek reboot and his “retirement” film about a vintage porno critic to his more classic threats to update titles like Halloween, Westworld, The Man from U.N.CL.E., Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic, and Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. One of the more promising projects in that pile of discarded drafts was Tarantino’s urge to direct the 2006 adaptation of Casino Royale, returning the pop culture image of James Bond to his 1960s roots. The project obviously went in another direction, hiring Daniel Craig to play the famous spy in a self-serious series of grim, grey thrillers set in the modern day. It’s easy to imagine the Tarantino spin on the franchise, though, with a new found extremity of violence in Bond’s international espionage, peppered with brighter colors & snappier dialogue in the stretches between world-saving kills. And thanks to the new straight-to-Shudder thriller Reflection in a Dead Diamond, it’s even easier to imagine than ever before.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond approximates what the Tarantino version of a James Bond film would’ve been like, except it’s much less talky and even more absurdly, stylishly violent than what you’re picturing. One of the details from Tarantino’s Bond pitch was that he wanted to bring back Pierce Brosnan as an older, more grizzled version of the character than the typical suave playboy type. Similarly, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is as reflective as its title suggests, casting giallo veteran Fabio Testi as an octogenarian spy who’s struggling to enjoy his retirement, since a neighboring guest at his luxury hotel on the French Riviera has triggered memories of his more exciting past. The more typically Bond-like Yannick Renier appears as the younger version of the international superspy John Diman, as memories of a violent past and the calmer facts of the present mix in what plays like Alzheimer’s induced hallucinations. The movie alternates between the two timelines at a dizzying rhythm, with Diman reliving his sado-masochistic battle with a femme fatale diamond smuggler with such urgency & ferocity that the audience quickly loses track of what’s real and what’s imagined. And that’s before we’re introduced to another past, faceless enemy who kills his targets by tricking them to believe they’re living in a genre film, executing them with the calling-card appearance of the word “Fin” — bringing in another note of Tarantino-style meta theatrics.

I do not mean to insult the creative voices of directors Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani by focusing so much on Tarantino here. Cattet & Forzani are formidable genre remixers in their own right, having kicked off the neo-giallo revival of recent years in early titles like Amer & The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears long before lesser filmmakers got there (and having moved on to reinvigorating the spaghetti Western in Let the Corpses Tan after the rest of the industry caught up to them). There’s a delirious maximalism to the couple’s filmmaking style that cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s work, even if their imagery exclusively traffics in the vintage genre ephemera of old. There have been dozens of proper James Bond films produced over the past 60 years (among other schlocky Eurospy knockoffs, some even starring Testi), and not a single one can claim to be half as visually stylish as what’s accomplished here. The screen-print silhouettes of classic Bond intros are animated in sadomasochistic fights to the death where diamonds serve as substitutes for both blood and ejaculate. Comic book panels, split-screen framing, and film projector layering rush to fill the screen with the coolest imagery possible every single moment. The blazing sun reflects off a nipple ring with the dizzying brightness of the lethal boat trip in Purple Noon. Black-leather ninja vamps extend razor-sharp claws through the fingertips of their motorcycle gloves to slash the faces of the goons who get in their way. Fragments of the classic Mission: Impossible clone masks wash up on the beach like a Dalí painting in motion. The femme fatale diamond thief announces her victim’s death by promising that, “Humanity will be rid of your fetid odor.” Cattet & Forzani may have a style of their own entirely separate from Tarantino’s, but as a trio they share a common goal: reviving abandoned genre filmmaking traditions by turning up the volume on every reachable knob until the audience begs for mercy.

The biggest hurdle for getting into Cattet & Forzani’s work is learning to let go of linear narrative logic and just enjoy their surface pleasures for what they are: cool as fuck. Personally, that loose grip on plot worked best for me in the giallo-nostalgic free-for-all of The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, since they were working within a genre that’s always cared more about style than story. The Bond-era superspy picture is a little more rigid in its thriller plotting than the Italo murder mysteries they’ve previously pulled from, but they break away from that restriction by introducing a supervillain who tricks John Diman into believing he is starring in a film within the film, titled Mission Serpentik. That choice frees the movie up to hallucinate whatever hip spycraft imagery it pleases from moment to moment, including absurdly silly details like a disco-mirror paillettes dress that doubles as a wearable camera or a foosball table that doubles as an instrument of death (after its handles are likened to the throttle on a motorcycle). If there’s any one piece of filmmaking Reflection in a Dead Diamond‘s storytelling structure reminded me of, it’s John Cena’s “Firefly Fun House Match” with Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania 36, in which Cena wrestled for the purity of his own soul within the liminal psychic space of his subconscious, untethered from the wrestling ring. Once you accept that John Diman is mostly thwarting enemies within his own mind, Cattet & Bruno are free to take the imagery wherever they please, following whatever whims a post-modern Eurospy picture might inspire. Even twenty years ago, the Tarantino version of a James Bond spy thriller likely would’ve been more grounded to the confines of reality than that, but I have a feeling he would’ve been drawn to very similar high-style, high-artifice imagery. It’s exactly the movie a modern fan of its genre’s retro glory days would want to see come to bloody life.

-Brandon Ledet

Spies (1928)

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I am excited to watch what’s being marketed as the final chapter in the Mission: Impossible saga later this week, but I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to be able to clear an entire evening for it. Clocking in at 169 minutes of Hollywood action spectacle, The Final Reckoning is easily the longest Mission: Impossible sequel to date. Likewise, the most recent James Bond sequel, 2021’s No Time to Die, clocked in at 163 minutes as the longest of its own decades-spanning franchise. The Fast and Furious series is following the same trend, with both 2021’s F9 and 2023’s Fast X breaking the 140min barrier because two hours is no longer enough space to tell the epic story of black-market street-racers who found a second life as international superspies. I have no doubt that its own upcoming finale, Fast 11, will be even longer. It’s clear that these decades-running espionage thriller series have become bloated through the virtue of their success, racking up enough international box office to earn a blank-check approval for every imaginable indulgence, supercharged by the egos of Hollywood Elite freaks like Tom Cruise & Vin Diesel. In a roundabout way, though, their exponentially expanding runtimes do call back to the earliest days of spy-thriller cinema, both in the episodic “Until next time…” storytelling of pre-show serials and in the epic scale of Fritz Lang’s 1928 genre landmark Spies (aka Spione), which in its original exhibition ran for an impressive 178 minutes, putting all of its modern decedents to shame. Even its incomplete, surviving prints stretch past the 140 minute mark, trimmed down by half an hour but still meeting the modern Hollywood standard.

Despite its near-three-hour runtime, Spies is not an especially self-serious or prestigious work. Lang sets his espionage saga against the same kind of impossible, expressionist backdrops crafted for his sci-fi epic Metropolis the previous year, but it’s all in service of telling a low-brow, pulpy romance between undercover spies. If the film has earned any historical or artistic prestige outside the typically masterful imagery of Lang’s monocled eye, it’s all due to the fact that it is almost a century old. Co-written with his wife & collaborator Thea von Harbou, Spies pioneers a long list of genre tropes both big (referring to the protagonist only by his agent number, 326) and small (comically tiny cameras, disappearing ink, etc). As a result, it now plays heavily tropey, taking three hours to tell a fairly simple love story between two spies who work for opposing agencies. Our somewhat heroic Agent No. 326 (Willy Fritsch) is employed by the German Secret Service to thwart the criminal-mastermind plans of Haghi (Rudolf “Dr. Mabuse” Klien-Rogge) to intercept a top secret British-Japanese peace treaty. Not nearly as suave nor as talented as he thinks, No. 326 is already on the Russian enemy’s radar at the start of his mission, and he’s assigned to be taken down by the femme fatale counterspy Sonja (Gerda Maurus), who’s always two steps ahead of his plan. Only, Sonja is secretly a bit of a softie, blackmailed by Haghi to commit evil deeds. Naturally, she immediately falls in love with No. 326, constantly saving his ass in times of crisis and engineering a scheme to free them both from their professional obligations so they can spend the rest of their lives in each other’s arms.

This airport paperback plot doesn’t sound especially substantial in the abstract, at least not when compared to other, juicier Fritz Lang triumphs of its era like Metropolis, Destiny, and M. It’s illustrated with the same German Expressionist gloom & grandeur as those more infamous works, however, finding Lang at the height of his powers (long before he sleepwalked through late-career studio noirs like Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). The opening prologue and explosive climax are especially stunning, kicking things off with a rapid-fire montage of espionage action and closing things out with a literal circus of violence. It’s at those bookends where Lang crafts isolated images in inserts that rival the beauty of any individual frame of classic cinema: a spy posing atop the rubble of an exploded bank wall, a low-angle close-up of an assassin on a motorcycle, a woman’s hands posed with gun & cigarette. There are a few other scenes sprinkled throughout the sprawling runtime that rival those images (namely, the makeup rituals of a creepy secret agent named Nemo the Clown and a boxing ring encircled by ballroom dancers), but much of the drama between those spectacular bookends takes on stage-play feel. Whereas Ernst Lubitsch would’ve turned No. 326 & Sonja’s ill-advised romance into a perverse romp (see: Trouble in Paradise), Lang & von Harbou craft a fairly somber story rife with blackmail, prostitution, opium addiction, and suicide. The old-fashioned sweetness of the central romance can’t help but be marred by the grim practicalities of spy work, which sometimes leads to bursts of violent visual poetry but often leads to conflicted players clawing their own faces in agony over who to be loyal to – lover or employer.

Even the relatively shortened Restored Cut of Spies was a little trying on my 21st Century attention span, which began to waver any time Lang strayed from grand German Expressionist spectacle to stage-bound melodrama. At the same time, I’ve seen plenty of Ethan Hunt, James Bond, and Dom Toretto spy thrillers in recent years that are just as long but not half as cool. It would’ve taken the same time commitment for me to catch up with the most recent Fast & Furious film, which I never got around to because nothing from the previous, even-longer one lingered with me past the end credits; they even found a way to make a forgettably dull image out of the Fast Family finally launching a car into space. Meanwhile, there are at least a dozen individual frames from Spies that will be burned into the back of my skull forever, even if it’s telling an equally inconsequential story as most of its modern equivalents. All that these bloated spy-thriller sequels need to do to earn their ever-expanding runtimes is take a page from Fritz Lang’s book and craft some of the most fantastic, gorgeously composed images in the history of cinema. It’s that simple.

-Brandon Ledet

Pathaan (2023)

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Maybe it’s a hacky move to constantly compare Indian action blockbusters to their Hollywood equivalents, but the latest wide-release Bollywood export Pathaan doesn’t leave me much room to avoid repeating the offense.  Between its global spyware espionage, military-grade streetracing warfare, and 92-floor supertower heist sequence, it’s impossible to not compare Pathaan to the soon-to-conclude Fast & Furious saga – its most obvious genre template.  At least it compares favorably.  I want to call Pathaan the best Fast & Furious movie since Furious 7 in 2015, but that would be inaccurate.  It’s only the best Fast & Furious movie since the Tollywood actioner Saaho in 2019, further proof that India’s various film industries are outshining Hollywood action spectacle in a way that hasn’t been seen since Hong Kong’s martial arts boom in the 80s & 90s.  It’s no surprise that the basic thrills of the Fast & Furious saga would be echoed & warped in its Indian equivalents, since the streetracing-turned-espionage action brand has been one of Hollywood’s more successful global exports for the past two decades.  Only, as the Fast & Furious saga has become self-aware of its situational humor & blatant disregard for real-world physics, it’s also become weirdly timid about sincerely pushing itself to an over-the-top extreme.  Movies like Pathaan & Saaho are outperforming their American inspiration point because they’re willing to sincerely indulge in the cartoon physics that CGI affords their car-racing superheroes without any ironic “Well, that just happened” meta-commentary.  They also take the thudding fight choreography of hand-to-hand combat seriously in a way American action films were starting to lose touch with (until the success of John Wick reinvigorated the practice), perfectly balancing the uncanny computer graphics and tactile physical brutality of the genre for thoroughly entertaining blockbuster spectacle – with music video romance & dance breaks.

What makes Pathaan special within these larger, global industry concerns is that it’s gunning for a second American action franchise’s genre template, beyond its debts owed to Fast & Furious.  Pathaan is an overt, unashamed bid to establish a new MCU-style interconnected universe that unites several pre-existing action epics under one behemoth brand.  It’s an origin story for its titular tough-as-nails superspy Pathaan (played by the immensely popular Shah Rukh Khan), but it is somehow not a standalone action thriller.  Pathaan is the fourth film in a series that previously did not exist, acting as a better-late-than-never crossover that groups together 2012’s Ek Tha Tiger, its 2017 sequel Tiger Zinda Hai, and the standalone 2019 actioner War into what will now be called YRF Spy Universe, as if that were production company Yash Raj Films’ plan all along.  Of the three previous entries in this brand-new series, I had only seen War, which made the mid-film cameo from the Salman Khan character Tiger and the obligatory post-credits “Assembling The Avengers” stinger hilariously incongruous with what was otherwise a functionally independent shoot-em-up.  So far, this legion of superspies is only connected through their occasional employment by the government intelligence agency RAW (India’s CIA equivalent), which they frequently disregard to serve global justice outside of legal means.  Both War & Pathaan detail the on-again, off-again bromance of two unstoppable supersoldiers who find themselves falling on opposite sides of the patriot-terrorist divide.  Our hero, of course, is the jingoistic patriot who will do anything to uphold the sanctity & security of Mother India – in Pathaan’s case because Mother India adopted him after a tough childhood orphaned in a poor Afghani village.  Naturally, our villain is the terrorist defector who has lost his way, using his training as an Indian supersoldier to take down his own country out of selfishness & bitterness.  You don’t need to know much more than that to enjoy these car chase blow-em-ups, which generally have a pro-wrestling sense of face-heel dynamics that are easy to jump into with or without three backlogged films of build-up.

If there’s anything especially disappointing about Pathaan and its retroactive YRF Spy Universe brethren, it’s that celebration of jingoistic patriotism.  War pulled direct inspiration from Hollywood’s vintage Jerry Bruckheimer & Michael Bay era of the 1990s, and its own nationalistic bent was indistinguishable from the rah-rah-America rabblerousing of that action blockbuster heyday; all that changed was the colors of the flag.  That ugly streak bleeds into Pathaan, despite it finding a more modern, multicultural point of inspo in the Fast & Furious saga.  Say what you will about Top Gun: Maverick‘s recent revival of Reagan-era American militarism, but it was at least polite enough to not name the home country of its enemy combatants.  Every time Pathaan squares off against Pakistani terrorists, Somali pirates, and Indian defectors he demands to speak his only acceptable language—Hindi—there’s a sharp reminder of why American action greats like Rambo & Commando have been neatly quarantined as a thing of the past.  Of course, that political queasiness does nothing to sour the in-the-moment pleasure of watching Pathaan whoop ass.  Something modern Indian blockbusters get exactly right about their vintage Hollywood equivalents is their breathless, wide-eyed celebration of their titular heroes as the coolest motherfuckers to ever walk the planet Earth.  Pathaan models aviator sunglasses in front of a high-powered music video wind machine; he pilots CGI helicopters inside enemy warehouses, flying away just ahead of a whooshing fireball; he locates & defeats international terrorists in the deepest corners of “the darknet”; he eats apple slices off the tip of his knife, accompanied by hard rock guitar & soaring synths.  The movie reminds you how mind-blowingly sexy & cool Pathaan is in every single scene, even when that means backing his latent xenophobia.  It may not be politically conscious art, but it’s at least more honest about its gleeful militarism than the more timid approach of Top Gun: Maverick.  It may hit every single pulled-out-of-retirement, assembling-the-team, tough-guy-narcissism action cliché mocked in MacGruber, but it at least appears to do so with full-hearted sincerity.  It may indulge in the worst IP-conscious industry maneuvers established by American brands like Fast & Furious and the MCU, but it at least delivers the goods when it comes to its over-the-top, jaw-dropping action set pieces.  Maybe I should stop comparing these Indian blockbusters to their American equivalents, or maybe I should just stop watching the American ones entirely, since they’re just not keeping up with the competition.

-Brandon Ledet

Spy Kids (2001)

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fourhalfstar

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I’m not always on board with what Robert Rodriguez is selling, but when he’s firing on all cylinders, his particular brand of of B-movie absurdity can be quite endearing. I think it might be a question of earnestness. he same intentional throwback-camp aesthetic that can be somewhat tiresome in titles like Planet Terror & Machete Kills work perfectly fine in more original-leaning material like The Faculty. In some ways, then, children’s media might be the perfect arena for Rodriguez’s schtick, since it requires a certain lack of ironic detachment. His first foray into the genre, 2003’s Spy Kids, is a case-in-point example of Rodriguez’s live-action cartoon hijinks & intentional genre send-ups working best without this usual hard-wink irony gumming up the magic. In a lot of ways Spy Kids plays like a feature-length cereal commercial (complete with ad placement for fictional cereal) that takes more than a few dark turns every time it can get away with it. For a quick glimpse into what I’m getting at here, check out htis clip of Alan Cumming singing the barnburner “Floop’s Dream” in one of the film’s more sublime moments. What the what?

In the film, the aforementioned Floop (played by Cumming) attracts the attention of international superspies/sexy parents through the children’s show/criminal operation Floop’s Fooglies. Floop’s evil deeds mostly revolve around genetic manipulation that turns former spies into horrific clown monsters he dubs “fooglies” & similarly ineffective world domination plots & extreme wealth eccentricity. When he abducts the parent-spies & threatens to turn them into fooglies, it’s up to their oblivious children to take up the family business & spring into action. The movie has a great deal of fun pulling humor from the spy industry’s goofier gadgetry (like an underwater SUV or an unwieldy jetpack), but for my money almost all of its best features revolve around Floops’s horror show of a lair. A virtual reality room that’s equal part’s Dodo’s Wackyland, Star Trek‘s holodeck, and the nightmare sequences of Ken Russell’s Altered States gives the movie a nice, surreal touch. Then there’s strange details like the “thumb thumbs” (humanoid flunkies made entirely of thumbs) and the fact that the Floop’s Fooglies theme song, when played backwards, is “Floop is a madman! Help us! Save us!”. And if you have any question of just how weird this movie gets, I’d like to direct you again to the “Floop’s Dream” clip. Go ahead. Watch it a second time. I’ve been practically running it on loop.

What I like most about Spy Kids is how the Floop’s Fooglies horror show is thoroughly mixed with its regular kids’ movie fare, as if it weren’t a nightmare vision of a saccharine hellscape. Regular old kids’ movie standards like poop jokes, McDonald’s ad placement, and goofy one-liners like “My parents can’t be spies! They’re not cool enough!” fit in very inconspicuously with the Floop-flavored terror as if the latter weren’t going to wake the pint-sized target audience screaming in the middle of the night. It’s an absurd, endearing combo that makes for  much more challenging children’s feature that what you’d typical expect from a movie with such heavy reliance on CGI & fake-looking, sanitized sets. I really should not have waited to watch Spy Kids as long as I did. Not only does it stand as an example of Rodriguez at his finest,  but it also gave the world the gift of “Floop’s Dream”, a clip I’m just going to leave right here just in case you haven’t watched it yet. It’s a beautiful thing.

Bonus Points: Besides the Floop insanity, I think Spy Kids is noteworthy for being a high profile film that not only gathering Latino greats Antonio Banderas, Danny Trejo, and Cheech Marin all in one feature, but also for writing in two Latino children as its leads (even if one of the actors they cast’s heritage wasn’t quite in line with that detail in reality). That’s a rare treat indeed. There’s also a great deal of implication that the “Machete” character Danny Trejo plays in the film is the very same Machete he plays in Rodriguez’s Machete franchise. That feature is no “Floop’s Dream”, but it’s a fun little tidbit to chew on, if nothing else.

-Brandon Ledet

D.E.B.S. (2004)

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three star

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I wish that I could have really, really loved this movie. D.E.B.S. is a perennial IFC favorite, and even though there was a period of time where this movie seemed to be on several times a week, I never managed to catch it. It’s a quirky movie with a great cast and a smart concept, and although it has a great stride once it hits it, it takes so long to get there that I can’t give it 4 stars based on the last act alone.

The premise of the film is that there is a secret test within the SATs that measures a person’s aptitude for espionage. Women who pass the hidden aptitude test are recruited into the D.E.B.S. (Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength), a clandestine spy academy where everyone dresses like Catholic schoolgirls and learn to be superheroes. Amy Bradshaw (Sara Foster) is the posterchild of the D.E.B.S., as she made the “perfect score” on the D.E.B.S. test, but she dreams of going to art school in Barcelona. Max Brewer (Meagan Good) is the trigger-happy leader of their quartet, joined by chain-smoking French sexpot Dominique (Devon Aoki) and perpetually ditzy Janet, who has yet to earn her stripes. Amy has recently broken up with her boyfriend, Homeland Security agent Bobby (Geoff Stults), a bro who refuses to accept that it’s over, when the D.E.B.S.’s handler Mr. Phipps (Michael Clarke Duncan) assigns the squad to surveil notorious supervillain Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), in whom Amy has an academic interest.

Lucy is a criminal mastermind, the last scion of a syndicate family who loves to steal, with diamonds, naturally, being her speciality. She’s back in the states and meeting with “former KGB” assassin Ninotchka Kaprova (Jessica Cauffiel); unbeknownst to the federal agencies tracking her, Lucy’s rendezvous is actually a blind date engineered by her bodyguard and adorably-devoted BFF Scud (Jimmi Simpson). When Bobby’s pettiness accidentally reveals the D.E.B.S. and other agencies to Lucy, a shootout ensues and she escapes, running into a warehouse where she and Amy have a pistol standoff/meet cute. Amy lets Lucy get away, and the latter realizes she’s falling for the enemy. After a few more encounters, Lucy stages a bank heist to meet Amy again, and the two abscond to be together. The rest of the D.E.B.S. organization (minus Janet, who knows Amy went willingly and begins a cyber-friendship with Scud) goes into scorched earth mode scouring the world for Amy, who’s happily shacked up; when they eventually discover the two and retrieve Amy, the D.E.B.S. Boss (Holland Taylor) agrees to cover up the incident to maintain the agency’s reputation, forcing Amy to denounce Lucy publicly at the senior prom, er, “Endgame.” Meanwhile, Lucy realizes she would rather live without crime than Amy, and sets to righting her wrongs and winning her back.

D.E.B.S. is often described as a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, but that comparison doesn’t track very well for me. The Angels were more like private detectives than spies, for one thing (at least in the original show). D.E.B.S. has more in common with Austin Powers than either the 70s Angels TV series or the godawful 2000 film adaptation (or its somehow-worse 2003 sequel) and, despite having a cast full of beautiful women, never feels like it was made with the male gaze in mind. The relationship between Amy and Lucy feels organic, if a little corny, and is never played for titillation or exploitation. There’s also a little bit of Josie and the Pussycats thrown in for good measure, with lots of colorful visuals and the third-act-squad-breakup plot development that was so popular from roughly the mid-nineties through the early-aughts, although it lacks that film’s subtlety and social commentary. As much as I enjoyed the movie once the romantic plot got rolling, overall, the film is ultimately too inconsistent to really leave a mark. As it turns out, combining clunky gags (there’s a callback joke about what Max and Amy said to each other on the first day of training as well that really thuds, as well as a one-liner about Amy going off book in her final speech) with sublime ones (Lucy and Scud lip-synching to Erasure’s “A Little Respect” over a montage of them returning stolen goods is a treasure, and the D.E.B.S.’s house’s security field having the same tartan pattern as their uniforms is a good visual joke) doesn’t work. And that’s not even getting into the inexplicably odd things that happen in this movie. Why do the D.E.B.S. top brass teleport in and out of every scene? Are they teleporting, or are they holograms?

The movie performed abysmally, making less at the box office than the average twentysomething owes in student loans. It didn’t even break six figures! But what can you really expect when you release a film that’s this uneven? Still, it’s definitely worth a watch. The soundtrack is great (there’s even a Postal Service track playing when Lucy decides to give up her life of diamond theft and doomsday lasering), which is always a plus. Brewster and Simpson make a really great on-screen pair with believable chemistry and comic timing, even if the D.E.B.S. (Amy included) are one-dimensional and kind of bleh. If you can get past some of the worst CGI gun sparks ever committed to film, this is a refreshing twist on the indie-tinged lesbian love story that was such a big draw ten years ago, just make sure you see it through to the cliché but cute conclusion.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

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fourstar

I’m not sure exactly why Guy Ritchie’s latest foray into highly stylized action cinema, a big screen adaptation of the 1960s television show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., has more or less flopped at the box office. Personally, I might at least be able to attribute my own reluctance to catch up with the picture to a little bit of superspy fatigue. So far this year the cinemas have been bombarded from the superspy likes of Kingsman: Secret Service, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, American Ultra, and a spoof of the genre simply called Spy. That’s not even taking into account the upcoming Stephen Spieldberg/Tom Hanks collab Bridge of Spies & the latest James Bond feature Spectre. If 2014 was the Year of the Doppelgänger, 2015 is certainly the Year of the Spy & The Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s returns may have suffered somewhat from a crowded market. It’s by no means been a devastating financial blow like Ritchie’s disastrous Madonna vehicle Swept Away, but it has struggled to earn back its $75 million budget, earning less than half of that sum in its U.S. theater run. What’s even more difficult to account for, however, is it the film’s middling reviews. I’m no Guy Ritchie fanboy, having seen less than half of the films that he’s released, but U.N.C.L.E. was easily the most fun I’ve ever had with the director’s sleek action movie aesthetic, however delayed my trip to the theater may have been.

Opening with a traditional James Bond credits sequence populated with sultry soul music, harsh red hues, and Cold War/Atomic Age stock footage, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. maintains a distinct sense of 60s-tinged, smart mouthed swank throughout its entire runtime. Sometimes its modernizing of the 60s superspy genre feels true to its sources. CGI-aided car chases work similarly to the manually sped-up action scenes of yesteryear. The classy noir lighting of 60s fare is brought into the 2010s with rainbow-colored lens flairs. Throwaway lines about “Hitler’s favorite rocket scientist”, enriched uranium, and smuggled Nazi gold all feel native to the era it’s evoking. At other times this modernization can work a little too much like borrowed Tarantino cool, especially in small details like the yellow grindhouse subtitles and the pop music & whistling on the film’s soundtrack, but even Tarantino borrowed those elements from older sources, so the similarities are more than forgiveable. What most distinguishes The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from, say, an Inglourious Basterds, is its calmly restrained chase of a smarmy, handsome aesthetic instead of Tarantino’s cartoonishly over-the-top tendency towards excess (which, of course, has its own distinct set of charms).

Speaking of calm restraint, just as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. remains poised & smugly handsome throughout its runtime, its American spy lead Solo (expertly played by Henry “Man of Steel” Cavill) prides himself on never losing his cool. As the CIA operative/international playboy Solo butts heads with quick-tempered KGB agent Illya (Armie “Winklevoss Twins” Hammer) & sexy German mechanic Gaby (Alicia “Ex Machina” Vikander) on a multinational mission to prevent a Nuclear Holocaust, he tries his damnedest to remain as coolly suave as if he were simply enjoying cocktail hour. A lot of humor is derived from watching Solo & Illya try to out-macho each other in activities as disparate as fistfights in restrooms to arguing over women’s fashion. Most of the film’s comedy, however, is dependent upon the sexual tension between all three leads & their escaped Nazi enemies (including a young married couple who look like an evil combination of Jason Schwartzman & Freddie Mercury and a character Tilda Swinton could play in her sleep). There’s an onslaught of innuendo in the film’s script, like when the art thief Solo offers to “fill the gaps” in a woman’s collection or to “take bottom” when divvying up which locks he & Illya will pick. By the time characters are nonchalantly delivering lines like “Want to have a go?” & “I wish I could stay to finish you off myself” the film’s earned enough goodwill to evoke full belly laughs instead of the light chuckles the first couple sexual quips elicit. Armie Hammer also gets great comedic mileage from the KGB hothead Illya, especially in the way he sweetly refers to mechanic Gaby as his “little chop shop girl” & the comically American Solo as “cowboy.”

No matter what the reasons for The Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s muted reception, I do feel the film has been a little shortchanged & I regret waiting so long to catch it in the theater. It has a distinct sense of smart, sexy glamour to it that suggests an alternate universe where Mad Men was an action-packed world of superspies instead of a slowburn of an existential crisis. The film’s sexual quips, use of wrestling as foreplay, gender reversal of the damsel in distress trope, and genre-faithful plot riddled with doublecrossings & double-doublecrossings all make for a fun, sleek picture that I’m sure will have a second life on Netflix & the like even if it’s not currently doing so hot in the theater. On top of these surface pleasures, Guy Ritchie makes some satisfyingly unique visual choices such as mounting cameras to the bows of boats, the fronts of safes, and car door mirrors for a effect that feels highly stylized, but genuinely earned. He’s also confident enough in his screenplay to imply offscreen action instead of showing every little explosive detail & to allow certain scenes to breathe for maximum effect, such as a particularly sublime moment when Solo is enjoying a picnic as his partner fends for his life in the background. As far as 60s throwback action & Nazi-killing revenge fantasies go, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is about as handsome & as confident as they come. If you’re like me & have been putting it off due to superspy fatigue, I’d suggest giving it a shot somewhere down the road. It has enough universal appeal that you’re likely to enjoy yourself.

-Brandon Ledet