‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’, Now Streaming on Netflix, Was a Turning Point for Guy Ritchie — and a High Point for Henry Cavill

Deadpool & Wolverine has probably been out long enough to mention a spoiler-y throwaway cameo: In one scene, in a montage of alternate timeline Wolverines, one of them is played not by Hugh Jackman, but Henry Cavill. Like many of the film’s jokes, this is a riff on behind-the-scenes, internet-driven rumormongering; at some point, Cavill was either tipped to play Wolverine for the MCU’s rebooted X-Men, or possibly just some fans’ version of what Deadpool would call an “educated wish” for the part. It’s also probably some kind of educated wish from Cavill himself, even if he doesn’t have specific designs on Wolverine; the man has spent over a decade attempting to find a signature role with some kind of basis in IP, be it Superman (who he played in life, death, and life for the Zack Snyder cycle of DC superhero movies), Sherlock Holmes (who he played, somewhat listlessly, in a series of Netflix kid pictures ), or Agent Argylle , whoever the hell that’s supposed to be. But his accidental signature role, one that’s informed his career and the career of its maker almost a decade after its release, has just popped onto the Netflix charts: It’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. , baby.

Guy Ritchie’s spy caper came out in 2015 to negligible box office, maybe because it was the wrong kind of hacky IP play to make in the heart of the superhero era. The ’60s TV adaptation is a ploy from a different era; back in the 1990s, we got one of these every six months or so, often but not always related to sitcoms that made no sense as films. It’s certainly bizarre that we got movies of The Beverly Hillbillies and McHale’s Navy before the more cinematic U.N.C.L.E. , which indeed was kicking around Hollywood as a potentially hot property for a full two decades before Ritchie finally got it made. He succeeded where Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David Dobkin, and Ritchie’s pal Matthew Vaughn failed – only to fail anyway, in the sense of the movie losing money.

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At the time, the movie was in the middle of Ritchie’s attempted self-promotion into Hollywood franchises, following two Sherlock Holmes movies (starring Robert Downey Jr. , not Cavill) and preceding an aborted King Arthur series plus his billion-dollar Disney adaptation . All of these movies have elements to recommend them – Ritchie movies are usually, at minimum, decent entertainment – but U.N.C.L.E. is the piece of IP that seems to have served as unlikely inspiration for Ritchie’s post- Aladdin makeover. In the 2020s, he’s become sort of a lads-and-dads Soderbergh, taking some inspiration from his old crime pictures in movies like The Gentlemen , but also going a bit bigger and glossier with the likes of Operation Fortune and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – and churning out at least one a year. His next film drops in January 2025, and it stars – you guessed it – Henry Cavill, the same guy who starred in this year’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare . (Ritchie has another movie shooting for a 2025 or 2026 release, though Cavill doesn’t appear to be in it, at least not yet.)

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Though Man from U.N.C.L.E. has an appreciative cult audience now, it didn’t exactly receive glowing notices back in 2015, in part because it was premised on what some saw as a kind of battle of the stiffs: Cavill, the Brit who played Superman, again had to flatten his accent to play stolid all-American spy Napoleon Solo, opposite Armie Hammer as Illya Kuryakin, Solo’s severe Russian counterpart from the KGB. Yet there are some unexpected strategic advantages to these less raffish leads and their handsomeness that looks so machine-tooled that it borders on the uncanny. Throughout his career, Ritchie has shown less overt designs on James Bond riffing than his pal Vaughn, yet he’s also quite good at it. In that context, Cavill and Hammer are just right as not-quite-Bond replacements who seem to divide 007’s famous qualities: Cavill has an unflappable suaveness, without the menacing sexuality; Hammer is more animalistic but considerably less charismatic than your average Bond. It’s a not-quite-spoken joke in the film that put together, they nearly equal one genuine superspy.

This yin and yang of stolid masculinity also allow the movie’s women to cut memorable figures in a manner previously unseen in Ritchie’s work. Alicia Vikander (as the mostly-good girl) and Elizabeth Debicki (as the femme fatale promoted to main villain) may get by on personal style – Vikander’s pajamas! Debicki’s towering height standing in a speedboat! – but that’s Ritchie’s whole deal, innit? His slick stylishness is his substance, and this may be his movie with the most pure aesthetic beauty to it, at least until its mixed-bag action climax. Ritchie clearly enjoys filming fisticuffs and foot chases, but he’s not really that much of a big-scale action guy. For all of his flash, he seems more comfortable with action when it can be a physical expression of character (or, at least, that character’s style).

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In retrospect, then, it feels like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is the movie that taught Ritchie how he could truly bring his own style into a big-budget production – and bring some big-budget panache into the lower-cost thrillers he’s been making lately. Operation Fortune and Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare are certainly more of a piece with this movie than his Sherlock Holmes adventures; he’s practically made a whole genre out of cheeky international spycraft. And on a practical level, this movie also hooked Ritchie up with Cavill and Hugh Grant, who both became repeat collaborators.

It’s natural, then, that both fans and stars of the movie openly yearned for a sequel as the original’s reputation grew, especially with its story serving as an origin for the U.N.C.L.E. organization. It was a longshot then, and now, with Hammer only just starting to test the waters following multiple disturbing sexual allegations and Warner Bros. in perpetual leadership disarray, it seems like one of those impossible missions you’ve heard so much about. But the unofficial Ritchie franchise continues, and maybe it’s ultimately preferable to keep this movie as a stand-alone delight, safe from being run into the ground. It may be a hard lesson for Cavill, who still hasn’t found his proper IP branding. But The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is more or less about how he shouldn’t necessarily bother when he can look good on a stylish, insouciant team.

Jesse Hassenger ( @rockmarooned ) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com , too.

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