The Sunday Mail
The Big and Small Screen
AT the peak of his powers, Andre “Dr Dre” Young was the music doctor — he was the guy everyone wanted to work with when their music career had either hit a snag or they had the goods and wanted to hit the industry with a bang.
It is kind of sad that our own music industry does not seem to have such talent but that is a story for another day.
The only reason I have decided to start this week’s edition by mentioning Dr Dre is because for some reason, he is the first name that pops up in my head anytime the name Guy Ritchie is brought up.
Not that I am a huge fan, but I see Ritchie as the kind of filmmaker that has the ability to bring out the best out of any person he works with. He did it with Gerard Butler, who at the time was having one of the most inconsistent string of films; starting off as a side note in Angelina Jolie’s smash hit “Lara Croft Tomb Raider” before hitting it big in 2007’s “300”.
The guy then disappointed everyone with films like “P.S I love You”, “Butterfly on a Wheel” and “Nim’s Island”, before working with Guy Ritchie in 2008’s “RocknRolla”.
This forced the world to stand up and take notice of Butler’s talents and then led him to getting arguably his best role ever in “Law Abiding Citizen”.
Butler’s is not the only career that Ricthie has done wonders for, he did the same with Jason Stratham and Vinnes Jones whom he has collaborated with on numerous occasions and somehow managed to keep relevant.
His greatest achievement, in my opinion, has to be how he managed to resurrect the career of Robert Downey Jnr. by working with him in the “Sherlock Holmes” sequels after a drug and alcohol addiction had more or less ruined him.
Today, Downey is one of the highest paid actors alive and the main attraction of Marvel Studios.
Guy Ritchie’s latest work, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” is a masterpiece.
Based on a 60’s American television series, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” is spy thriller that tells the story of a coalition between America’s CIA, Russia’s KGB and later England’s Secret Service who are all brought together when a Nazi scientist is kidnapped and it is feared that he has made a nuclear bomb for the enemy.
Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill), an art thief turned CIA agent, is then forced to work with the KGB’s trusted agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) as they track down the scientist’s daughter Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) in hopes that she would help them track down her father and avert yet another World War.
The film then chronicles how these two men are brought together, forge an unlikely friendship and battle the evil couple of Victoria (Elizabeth Debicki) and Alexander Vinciguerra (Luca Calvani).
The film is the ideal movie to whet the appetite of any James Bond fan out there, who cannot wait to see the latest James Bond instalment — “Spectre”.
It has a huge Ian Fleming influence about it and that is more or less a given that Fleming wrote the books that both films are based on. The camera work is exquisite. While the plot appears loose in some areas, it comes off solid because the performances are totally out of this world.
Henry Cavill gives arguably one of the best James Bond auditions that I have ever seen while Ritchie does wonders to make Armie Hammer look like a guy who actually has some sort of talent.
After the train wreck that was 2013’s “The Lone Ranger”, I had more or less given up on the guy and almost erased him from memory. But here, Ritchie somehow manages to make the 29-year-old American actor look like the star he is — bad Russian accent and all.
There is a little bit of everything that makes a good spy movie — a good plot, numerous twists and reveals, solid performances all round and excellent characterisation.
Kudos to Ritchie and his friends for uncharacteristically painting a positive picture of women in a spy movie.
Unlike in countless James Bond and other spy movies, women here are at the fore of the movie. Aside from Cavill, I found Elizabeth Debicki and Alicia Vikander as the most fascinating characters in the movie, both from a story and performance point of view.
When we are first introduced to Vikander’s Gaby Teller, she is your typical Bond girl type of character; hapless damsel in distress whose main purpose is to either look good for the camera or hold some vital piece of the puzzle.
However, as the film develops, she grows with it right up to the point of her big reveal. Luca Calvani is the consummate embodiment of femme fatale — young, gorgeous and deadly.
She is the film’s main protagonist and while she hardly has enough screen time to bring out the best of the material, Calvani goes to town in every second of screen time she gets.
Not to be outdone by the ladies, Hammer and Cavil demonstrate an inept kind of chemistry that hides any flaws the two have in their performances.
By flaws, I mean Cavill is too relaxed and too Bond-ish for his own good, while Hammer has this atrocious fake Russian accent. However, both make up for each other’s flaws and their constant bickering is a thing of gold.
The camera work, music soundtrack and locations do wonders to tell the story of the time and I thought it was a good touch to broadcast recordings of JFK speeches.
It really sold the time period that the film was supposed to be based local filmmakers need to realise that such attention to detail goes a long way in selling the story.
