journal features

movie review - The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2016.02.04

This is a spy movie in which a new agency is created to tackle special cases on a global basis. It pulls together a disparate cast of rogues and puts them against .. a dispirate cast of rogues. Set in the sexy sixties, a US agent and a USSR agent join forces to prevent a rogue Italian billionaire from founding a terrorist organization armed with nuclear weapons.

The movie's tone and pacing and purpose seem to veer about wildly as the odd plot (Italian billionaire who wants what?) and the mandatory development of the relationships between the team of spies take up a lot of screen time. We're subjected to a main cast that seems bored with the project, two guys saying their lines at each other with at-times visible impatience. I don't know if something was wrong on set, but that how it feels.

Anyway, the movie had its moments and I think I could feel someone in there desperately trying to make this work, but on the whole it felt like watching people at a dysfunctional company get through their respective day.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton