The Man from UNCLE: the TopGear.com review

Has there ever been an automotive era more glorious than the early 1960s? And will there ever be in future? Unlikely.

From Ferrari 250 to Jaguar E-Type, from AC Cobra to Aston DB4, these few years have become ossified in history as the high watermark of car design and glamour.

And it's the early Sixties unashamedly celebrated in Guy Ritchie’s new spy flick, The Man From UNCLE, which sees immaculately tailored secret agents dashing around a 1963-spec Europe with all the boring, utilitarian bits airbrushed out.

Purportedly our pair of heroes are attempting to defuse a nuclear device that’s fallen into the wrong hands, but mostly they’re busy wearing excellent suits, delivering double-entrendre-laden one-liners, and tooling round in stunning period machinery, from Citroen HY vans to woody speedboats to Metisse bikes to a Series II Land Rover.

It’s all rather jolly. The plot is authentically Cold War-hammy – rogue scientist develops dirty bomb, American and Russian secret agents must team up to prevent a billionaire fascist getting his maniacal mitts on it – while Henry Cavill’s Napoleon Solo, a former art thief turned CIA spy, is the sort of secret agent you want to be: irreproachable suit, irreproachable hair, none of the internal torture so apparent within Daniel Craig’s modern interpretation of 007.

The car chases – both the opening scene, in which Trabants and Wartbergs slide cheerily around the grim streets of East Berlin, and the final shoot-out, which sees the Landie and Metisse bike battling some sort of deranged sandrail (period-correct? Um, probably...) on a private Mediterranean island – are expertly executed, and feel far more earthy than the CGI-fest we’ve become accustomed to from, say, the Fast and Furious franchise.

The sequence at Goodwood – seamlessly doubling as an Italian playboy racetrack – is glorious, too, with tiny, anteater-nosed F1 cars screaming round an enclosure packed with heartbreakingly lovely old Mercs, Astons and more.

Most of all, the Man From UNCLE is just good fun, a spy film that doesn’t take itself too seriously. If you find Craig’s soul-searching Bond a touch… introspective for his own good, TMFU represents a knowing throwback to the Sean Connery and Roger Moore era of spy flicks, all gadgets, snappy one-liners and authentic misogyny.

For us lot, though, the real joys of The Man From UNCLE lurk on the roadside of the Rome street scenes: a rose-tinted homage to the epicentre of post-war cool, with the automotive furniture to match. Forget the special-issue weaponry and the glamorous girls: all you really want to do is wander the car-lined streets of Ritchie's Rome. And if you don’t desire an original Fiat 500 by the end of this, you’re officially a little dead inside.

Of course, even the most nostalgic would concede the 1960s weren’t really quite like that: not everyone was dressed in a santoku-sharp three-piece, and not every city street was lined with showroom-fresh Citroen DSs and gleaming Vespas.

But hey, isn’t that the point in big-budget summer blockbusters: to serve up a healthy dose of escapism? The Man From UNCLE may not explore the nuances of the human condition, nor probe the subtleties of Cold War politics, but it’s a cheery celebration of the finest bits of the Sixties. They don't make 'em like they used to, etc etc...