At Comic-Con last week, a trailer for a later summer movie appeared for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and it got a lot of people's attention. The film is a re-imagining of the show from 1964-1968, and the trailer reveals quite a lot about this new offering of a very old spy-film franchise. This is what is known about The Man from U.N.C.L.E. release date, trailer, and the cast.
The film's trailer shows a lot of great action, and a pretty stellar cast. It seems like Henry Cavill was the star of Comic-Con trailers for 2015 as the Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice certainly made quite an impression, but for a different reasons than The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. trailer begins with Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer from The Lone Ranger fame) being chased by Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill). The scene is full of a lot of interesting car chases and gunfire, and as it so happens, these two will end up working together to stop a shadowy criminal organization who has its hands on an atom bomb.
This sounds like one of those mismatched buddy-cop films, it is actually a spy-fi film. If you are not familiar with spy-fi, it is essentially a genre of fiction that hasn't really had a good offering. It was very popular in the sixties, and the plots featured some of the usual James Bond conventions like a villainous mastermind and a lot of great setpieces. Shows like the British sixties The Avengers (no relation to the Marvel superhero franchise of the same name) made this genre incredibly popular, and the series The Prisoner were UK shows that were popular enough to make it over to America.
This new version of The Man of U.N.C.L.E. appropriately takes place during the 1960's, which would make this a period piece. Solo is a top agent of the CIA while Kuryakin is in the KGB. Considering that the cold war is going on, you know it would have to take something big to make these two superpowers working together.
The film is directed by Guy Ritchie, who is best known for his British crime films like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and Revolver. He also directed both of the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies. In addition to its spy stars, it features Alicia Vikander as Gaby Teller and Elizabeth Debicki as Victoria Vinciguerra, not to mention Hugh Grant as Waverly.
The original television show features Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo and David McCallum as Illya Kuryakin, and apparently the United Nations were upset about the U.N. in the U.N.C.L.E., but the acronym is for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. The show was contributed to by Ian Fleming, creator of superspy James Bond, and there was even an episode with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, before they were on Star Trek.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. will appear in theaters on August 14, 2015. You can find the trailer on Games Radar, and I'm hoping that this film will bring the spy-fi genre back again, even if it is purposefully retro.
