The James Bond novel Live and Let Die has a scene where James Bond arrives at a luxury hotel in New York City. The descriptions of luxurious shaving kits, high thread-count sheets and extravagant meals over the subsequent several pages are downright pornographic. We are all familiar with James Bond the alcoholic and James Bond the sex haver, but the movies have largely forgotten James Bond the sybarite. The spy story as escapist fantasy—concerned more with travel writing, foodie Instagram paragraphs and descriptions of clothes that would make George R.R. Martin blush—isn’t really to be found in Skyfall (Kingsman:The Secret Service has it, but in a slightly different idiom: spy movie as Harry Potter Chosen One fantasy). The Man From UNCLE tops James Bond in glamorous spy pastiche.

It just doesn’t have anything else.

The Man From UNCLE Movie Review

Starring Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill as, respectively, Russia’s top spy Illya Russianname and America’s top spy Napoleon Solo. They are assigned to work together (Solo’s direct superior is Jared Harris rocking an awful American-growl accent) to track down a former Nazi nuclear scientist whose new uranium enrichment process is highly desired by a terrorist organization with designs on revitalizing the Reich. They team up with the scientist’s daughter, Gaby (Alicia Vikander), to track him down.

This is the perfect kind of movie for Guy Ritchie, who, after abandoning his increasingly tiring Cockney Tarantino schtick, has proven adept at taking dull scripts and reheated reboot concepts (Sherlock Holmes, but, uh, steampunk this time!) and adding just enough flair and attention to detail that the wafer-thin meat feels good sliding by. Like White Castle.

Ritchie loads The Man From UNCLE with signature splits-screens and snap-zooms and playful dancing to playful music and it mostly works. The production design is even better, with a swinging 60’s vibe that’s silly but not rote, and several notches above other recent weightless fare set in the 60’s like X-Men: First Class and Men In Black 3.

And for a while it’s fun to watch Cavill’s Napoleon Solo wallow in it all. An art thief and gourmand, Solo may not be Cary Grant charming (but who is?), but his witty-enough lines delivered at charming-enough cadence get the work done. It’s especially fun that Solo has a bit of foppish streak in The Man From UNCLE: pointing out to Gaby that her food is expensive, cradling his poor widdle head in pillows before passing out, and whining when he leaves a suit jacket behind.

Cavill is paired with Armie Hammer, who does his best with the more serious Ilya. And while the sense of competition between him and Solo can be fun (though I’m sick of foreign agents calling Americans “cowboys”), his budding relationship with Vikander sputters. There’s a hard limitation on how serious viewers will be able to take the Russian agent of The Man From UNCLE seriously, given how many Daddy Issues and crying kid tantrums the script saddles him with.

But while Vikander, Solo, and Hammer tromping around Italian car races and flirting with everyone is diverting in a Ocean’s 50 Percent of the Charm sort of way, the actual spy story is dull, dull, dull. Gunfights, boat chases and car chases all feel perfunctory. And while it’s nice The Man From UNCLE doesn’t feel the need to go all Call of Duty: Fast and the Furious, the movie’s other offerings just aren’t enough. The last 45 minutes go a little something like this: boring torture scene, boring shooting scene, boring car chase, boring radio conversation, boring explosion.

The best scene in The Man From UNCLE is set in a clothing store as Gaby, Napoleon, and Ilya fight over what Gaby will be wearing during the mission. The men each throw a slew of designer label names at each other: the first dick-measuring sequence that turns on whether or not a belt will match a certain dress. It’s the height of what The Man From UNCLE is good at, and a genuine lesson other spy movies have forgotten. But if you want actual spying or any sense of danger, you’ll have to wait for The Man From UNCLE 2.