Ouch! Even though I was instantly thrilled when I saw that Guy Ritchie had made a movie based on the old Man from UNCLE television series, I was also suspicious that the release date had been scheduled in mid-August, which is usually a dumping ground for dead dogs and moldy cheese. My enthusiasm was further tested when I saw the 
previews; Henry Cavill seemed to be a pretty good choice to succeed Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo, but big, muscular Armie Hammer just plain didn’t look right as Illya Kuryakin. No, David McCallum personified that character: slender, bookish, poetic, intelelctual. Maybe Ritchie felt obliged to reinvent the man for a generation that doesn’t read. Alas, my suspicions proved correct. The movie did just enough things right to prove to be a huge disappointment. Hugh Grant was a
shrewd pick as Mr. Waverly, and Elizabeth Debecki was terrific as the fashionable villainous Victoria Vinciguerra.But the back stories were unimaginative, the east-west rivalty was banal, the abandonment of all the UNCLE lore and iconography was a huge misjudgment. J.J. Abrams taught the world how to do a cinematic reboot of a TV series with Star Trek in 2009: the key is to preserve the characters the audience loves. Tom Cruise, to his credit, also figured this out with the Mission Impossible series, whose fifth installment, Rogue Nation, proved to be inventive and fun. Some time ago Cruise figured out that the teamwork in the series was more important than the plot, and this episode again works that angle to perfection. The new wrinkle this time is a rival agent played by a little known British actress named Rebecca Ferguson, who is every bit as cool as Honor Blackman and might even rival–dare I say it?–the amazing Diana Rigg. Well, no, I guess she’s not all that. But she is smashing!
