The Man from U.N.C.L.E. review: Sixties spy-caper style over substance

I've been expecting you, Mr Solo. It's nearly 50 years since The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the super-slick spy series starring neat men, ended its TV run. A film version had been in and out of production for two decades. Such delay often foretells disaster.

We should, thus, be grateful that Guy Ritchie's period-heavy adaption is even the modest success it has turned out to be. Mind you, it could have been better still. The opening set-piece, in which US agent Napoleon Solo (all of Henry Cavill, every bit of him) flees Soviet bashing-machine Illya Kuryakin (the even more substantial Armie Hammer) across the old East Berlin is, for this writer, the best hunk of Bond action since Roger Moore danced across crocodiles in Live and Let Die.

Sadly, after that, we encounter a plot too threadbare for a mid-season episode of Get Smart. Some glamorous maniac (Elizabeth Debicki) is caught up in a plan to set the superpowers at each other's throats by doing something irresponsible with a nuclear weapon. This brings the Soviet and the US secret services together in common cause.

Linking up with the daughter (Alicia Vikander) of a rocket scientist , our two heroes argue their way across various exotic locations while avoiding the attentions of hoodlums with silenced revolvers. (Confusingly, Vikander’s character is named Gaby Teller in presumed reference to real-life H-bomb boffin Edward Teller.)

Hammer and Cavill work pretty well together, but it would have been nice if – as was the case with Robert Vaughn and David McCallum in the original – there had been more marked physical distinction between the two . They have dyed Hammer’s hair blonde, but not blonde enough. We are still looking at squabbles between two, equally charming Brooks Brothers models.

What just about saves the film is its shameless addiction to period porn (we use that last word analogously). To say that the central sequence plays like a homage to 1960s Martini commercials is not to criticise. Ritchie, never a director who gets far beneath the surface, revels in the solar flares, heavy eye make-up and fastidiously pressed shirts.

It proves a perfectly pleasant way of wasting two hours.