Quentin Tarantino got harsh criticism for this beloved Henry Cavill flop

Few films languish in Hollywood studio development hell as long as “The Man From UNCLE.” Based on the 1960s NBC spy series starring Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo and David McCallum as Illya Kuryakin, two intrepid agents working for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, the big-screen project received a boost when Quentin Tarantino considered making a move to the big studios after the massive success of “Pulp Fiction”. The filmmaker ultimately realized he didn’t need to take the independent studio route and instead made “Jackie Brown” (which remains his best film).

Nonetheless, “The Man From UNCLE” continued to attract the attention of some of Hollywood’s biggest names. Steven Soderbergh was attached at one point and George Clooney considered an offer to perform solo. Soderbergh dropped out when his vision for a 1960s version of the material proved too costly for Warner Bros. Ultimately, after almost all of Hollywood’s stars had dropped out of the production, Guy Ritchie stepped in and kept the cameras rolling on a dynamic, sexy and exciting picture starring Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer and Alicia Vikander. The film received mostly good reviews, but fell far short of commercial expectations ($110 million worldwide against a budget of $84 million). This was also not accepted by the man who refused to direct “UNCLE”. Why didn’t Quentin Tarantino like Ritchie’s “The Man From UNCLE”?

Speaking to novelist Bret Easton Ellis for T Magazine in 2015, Tarantino denounced a wide range of films (e.g. “A Clockwork Orange,” “Vertigo” and “Selma”), eliciting fist pumps and howls of outrage from one sentence to the next. “The Man from UNCLE” had just hit theaters at that time and had yet to gain its enthusiastic cult following. So Tarantino wasn’t offending too many people (except maybe Ritchie and Vikander) when he started making the film.

Tarantino opens with some praise before expressing his displeasure with the plot. “The first half was really funny and great,” he told Ellis, “But the whole second half I’m like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, we were supposed to care about the bomb? What’s going on here? Was I supposed to pay attention to this stupid story?'” As for the performances, he said, “Henry Cavill was fantastic, but I didn’t like the girl at all,” he said.

Vikander gives my favorite performance in the film (I particularly like the scene where she gets into a playful hotel room fight with Hammer); If I had my choices, she would have won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2015 instead of Tom Hooper’s terrible “The Danish Girl.”

I was never convinced that a “Man From UNCLE” movie needed to exist, but I can’t imagine a more pleasingly elegant lark than the one Ritchie constructed.