Next month’s The Man from UNCLE reminds us that spy thrillers can also fun

This is already shaping up to be a great year for espionage thriller fans. We’re finally getting a SPECTRE movie in November and The American’s season three finale left plenty of slack jaws. And while many of use are still mumbling about the lack of a Black Widow solo outing, there’s one movie that isn’t getting a lot of attention and that’s the Guy Ritchie helmed reboot of the 60‘s spy caper TV classic, The Man from UNCLE.

For those unfamiliar, the original series paired odd-couple US and USSR agents, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin as they took on global threats larger than the Cold War pissing contest the rest of the world was engaged in. It also had 007 creator, Ian Fleming, contributing initial concepts and has an arch enemy who was influenced by the Sherlock Holmes nemesis, Moriarty.

The new movie stars Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) as Solo and Armie Hammer (The Lone Ranger) as Kuryakin and carries with it all the frenetic insanity of any of Guy Ritchie’s work. It also brings out a few of Ritchie’s signature elements including strong leads who riff off of one another and a tendency towards improv, “every morning you know your lines but expect them to change, or be prepared for any kind of change. Some days they stay exactly as they are and other days they change completely, and that’s quite refreshing,” explained Cavill with Ritchie admitting, “Clearly there’s a zone that I’m attracted to, and that’s men on men, so to speak [laughs]. I like that world, even going back to Lock, Stock. I’m interested in that world, so there’s nothing revolutionary that I’m attracted to that as a genre.”

Introducing a 50 year old series to a new generation runs the risk of feeling too referential or nostalgic, and those challenges were something Ritchie targeted from the get-go, “It’s funny, because what I remember of the series, as is so often the case, what you remember of the series, and on revisiting it it’s not what you remember it to be, but in a way that didn’t bother me. What I remembered in the series was the tone and I was interested in that, I suppose. What I remember it being, and what it was, are two different things, but I liked what I remembered, if you know what I mean, and that’s what inspired me to do something about it.”

The Man From UNCLE looks like a blast and hits theaters next month on August 14th.