CHICAGO – Excelsior! Comic book legend Stan Lee’s famous exclamation puts a fine point on the third and final play of Mark Pracht’s FOUR COLOR TRILOGY, “The House of Ideas,” presented by and staged at City Lit Theater in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. For tickets/details, click HOUSE OF IDEAS.
Film Review: ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ Just a Big Screen Bore
CHICAGO – Director Guy Ritchie’s big screen version of the 1960’s spy show “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” is a colossal waste of time for all involved. The original show was never all that good to begin with, but this film is never able to clear that admittedly low bar, or even replicate any of the TV show’s small pleasures.
Rating: 2.5/5.0 |
Trouble begins almost immediately with an opening credits sequence – which is strangely at odds with the otherwise arch tone of the proceedings. Current Superman Henry Cavill (“Man of Steel”) plays the impeccably-dressed American agent Napoleon Solo, while Armie Hammer is Russian KGB agent Illya Kuryakin. They are forced to pair up to track down a former Nazi nuclear scientist now working on a bomb for a mega-corporation in Italy.
Of all the cast members, only Cavill strikes the right tone. He’s an immaculately dressed clotheshorse who doesn’t seem to take anything too seriously. Every quip and line reading seems delivered with an arched eyebrow, and he seems to relish the opportunity to be freed from his brooding turn as the Son of Krypton. Armie Hammer runs more trouble as the supposedly humorless KGB agent who still has to deliver faux witticisms about his own Russian humorlessness. Alicia Vikander looks stunning as an East German auto mechanic who must first be smuggled into the west and then help our heroes stop a nuclear war, but she is given little to do.
Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer in ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’
Photo credit: Warner Bros.