The “stupid” movie that lost Quentin Tarantino halfway through: “What the fuck is going on here?”
It’s all well and good being won over by the opening stretch of a movie, but if everything falls to pieces in the second half, then that’s all an audience will remember. Quentin Tarantino felt that way about a big-budget blockbuster that completely lost him at the midway point, and it was one that he had a previous attachment with.
Even if you don’t care for his work, Tarantino can never be accused of letting his films collapse under themselves at the end. From the nerve-shredding Reservoir Dogs finale to the delightfully over-the-top shootout in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood via the unhinged and blood-soaked finales to Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, he knows how to wrap things up on a high note.
A concerning amount of studio-backed releases don’t, though, especially those damned superheroes and their giant sky beams. It feels as if every second or third so-called ‘crowd-pleaser’ completely abandons its narrative in the name of special effects and spectacle, which wasn’t the two-time Academy Award winner’s only concern.
If you’ve seen it, which isn’t guaranteed when it fell flat at the box office and didn’t make enough money to justify the sequel it was clearly designed to generate, what was the plot of Guy Ritchie’s The Man from UNCLE? Something about spies and espionage, obviously, but how do Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer get from the East Berlin opening scene to the resolution at the end of the third act?
It’s got something to do with a shadowy criminal organisation, nuclear weapons, the CIA, the KGB, the daughter of a missing German scientist, the niece of a Nazi sympathiser, a watch, an undercover MI6 officer, an island lair, a data disc, and plenty of double-crossing and duplicity, so it’s OK if it doesn’t immediately spring to mind, because it’s mostly nonsense.
For a while, Tarantino was having fun, until he realised he was supposed to be following along with a plot that was too needlessly complex and convoluted for its own good. “The first half was really funny and terrific,” he conceded. “But in the whole second half, I’m like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, were were supposed to care about the bomb? What the fuck is going on here? I was supposed to pay attention to the stupid story?”
This being one of Hollywood’s most prominent self-congratulators, he no doubt thinks that he could have made a better version of the same film. He almost did, too, telling the Village Voice that he’d previously “flirted with the idea of a Man from UNCLE movie,” before adding that he “grew out of the idea.” Ritchie didn’t, and he was far from the first name to fancy a crack at it.
The adaptation of the 1960s TV show had been in the works since the early 1990s, passing through the hands of countless writers and directors, including Tarantino. Steven Soderbergh almost got it off the ground with a script from Scott Z Burns, Emily Blunt as the female lead, and George Clooney circling the part of Napoleon Solo, but it wasn’t to be.
It’s not a memorable spy thriller by any stretch of the imagination, although Hugh Grant is good value in the minimal scenes that he steals every time, but it remains odd that a devoted cinephile like Tarantino was surprised that he actually needed to pay attention to what he was watching.
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