The Man from UNCLE is new on Netflix — but Armie Hammer is still in it

For the better part of a decade now, I’ve been checking in from time to time on whether Guy Ritchie’s 2015 spy caper The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was available for casual streaming. As a spy movie, I enjoyed it more than any James Bond or Jason Bourne film, or even any Mission: Impossible movie — Ethan Hunt’s big stunts and endless face-swapping are a good time in the theater, but they rarely stick with me long. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. has a particular form of ensemble energy none of those movies have. It’s also a film built around a few really specific, endlessly revisitable setpieces in the way that makes easy streaming access to it more of a draw than owning a copy. So I was psyched to see it finally hit Netflix on July 27 — except that now I have to figure out how I feel about Armie Hammer.

To recap: Ritchie’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. reboots a 1960s TV show of the same name, and takes its visual style from ’60s thrillers, particularly when it comes to the sharp, striking costume designs. The plot has two 1960s spies — CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and KGB Agent Illya Kuryakin (Hammer) — first facing off in the field, then forced to work together to stop a nuclear threat. From the start, they despise each other. At one point, they wreck a dilapidated bathroom while fighting each other. Later, they confine the violence to verbal barbs. They’re absolute catty queens about this conflict: They insult each other’s countries, bodies, and brains, and they both sulk or squirm if the other one gets in a particularly apt zinger.

There are women in this movie too — Alicia Vikander as Gaby, a state asset they both have to protect, and Elizabeth Debicki (recently memorable in Maxxxine) as the villain, a Nazi-sympathizing sociopath. Both of them do their best to contribute to the too-cool-for-school ’60s spy-antic atmosphere. Debicki has one particularly great, spy-movie-classic scene with Cavill as they try to outwit and out-seduce each other. Vikander has a harder row to hoe as a character mostly stuck in the victim/prize-to-win role, with a particularly dubious scene where she tries to seduce Kuryakin just to be a brat about being under his protection.

But they’re both still backdrops to the real show in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. — two chiseled, dangerous men exchanging nonstop one-liners about how much they hate each other, as they work to defeat a particularly sleek and stylish evil — and more importantly, as they work toward a heavily foreshadowed prisoners’ dilemma moment where one or both of them will have to choose whether to betray the other.

I love everything about Cavill and Hammer’s performances, and about how they’re scripted in this movie, as equals in radically different modes, and as spy-movie paragons with just enough vulnerability under their masks. Ritchie and co-writer Lionel Wigram let Solo be a smirky, superior bastard until he sees what Kuryakin is capable of as an opponent, at which point he’s genuinely unnerved. They have an Legolas-and-Gimli pouty one-upmanship over who does stealth infiltration better, and who has better techniques or gear. Even in the inevitable Bond-derived capture-and-torture sequence, Solo falls grimly silent in the face of a monologuing baddie, and is obviously unnerved by the prospect of agony and death, instead of responding by laughing and quipping at his captor.

I love this movie. But there’s the Armie Hammer problem.

When a movie star has a big public fall from grace, whether it’s deserved or not, there are easy ways to dodge ethical questions about continuing to consume their work: “Well, you have to separate the art from the artist.” Or “Boycotting their output would unfairly hurt all the other people who worked on this project.” Or “At most, he might get two cents from me streaming this movie, so… whatever.” I’ve never really been comfortable with any of those arguments, which all feel like evasions rather than decisions about how to engage with an artist’s real-world behavior.

And I’m similarly uncomfortable with some aspects of the Hammer scandal. His career imploded in 2021 when a former partner posted on Instagram, revealing text messages he’d sent her about his violent sexual fantasies. Other exes soon came forward, accusing him of physical, mental, and sexual abuse and assault. A police investigation was opened, but charges were never pursued, due to lack of evidence. Hammer has maintained that fantasies are just fantasies, and that the horrifying events his ex-partners described did happen, but were part of negotiated, consensual BDSM scenes.

I have complicated feelings about all of this, and they directly conflict with each other. There’s no easy way to reconcile my dislike of the kink-shaming and privacy violations in this case with my frustration over victim-blaming and the culture of disbelief around women who expose bad behavior in powerful men. Or my distaste for the prurient, gleefully jokey, endlessly self-righteous interest that the media and social-media users took in Hammer’s explicit, violent texts about breaking a partner’s bones and drinking her blood.

I didn’t want this window into Armie Hammer’s head, or into his sex life. But I also don’t want to give him a free pass with a cavalier “Well, it’s a he-said-she-said situation.” I sympathize with the women who feel he used alcohol, drugs, money, fame, and charm to lure them into situations where consent was complicated and compromised. In situations involving people’s private relationships and especially their sex lives, I personally believe that any kind of objective truth is impossible to reach, because all the participants experienced the same events so differently. (A point the recent Best Picture nominee Anatomy of a Fall explores explicitly, and with a lot of fascinating nuance.)

Mostly, in any case like this, I remind myself that I have no power to affect the outcome, and that no one needs another yammering voice in the mix, caping for a celebrity or for total strangers. I’m not on a jury. I am not being forced to have an opinion over who wronged who the most. And I recognize that while people (and the internet hordes in particular) love a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil narrative — like, for instance, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., in which jerky but heroic patriots team up to battle literal nuke-owning Nazis — the real world is almost never that simple.

The Armie Hammer question is a little more complicated right at this exact moment because he seems to be floating a trial balloon for a comeback. After a few years of near-invisibility, after he lost his representation and his existing contracts, he’s suddenly back in the news with a few extended interviews with carefully chosen interlocutors: Bill Maher and Piers Morgan, men that Hammer could absolutely count on to comfortingly pat his back and sympathize about “the unfairness of the woke mob,” accept his “Well, I barely carved my initial on her hip” deferral, and not actually question his version of the story. Man From U.N.C.L.E. finally hitting streaming after nearly 10 years, at the precise moment that Hammer emerges from hiding… the timing feels a little weird, to say the least.

But a Netflix premiere also seems far too minor to work as a test balloon to gauge how much people remember or care about the accusations against Hammer, beyond recalling the memes and the cannibal jokes. The interviews are much more significant — and given how much they center on Hammer downplaying all the accusations against him, they’re much more of a step toward a rehabilitation tour and a return to acting. He’s been saying all the required things from the Hollywood-comeback checklist — that he’s learned from the experience, that it did him good to lose his fame and fortune because it taught him who his real friends were and put his ego in check. He’s said the entire scandal was a net positive for him. I’d be very surprised, though, if that stopped him from returning to Hollywood if a second act becomes a possibility.

After just a few days on Netflix, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is already on the Top 10 most-streamed films list. That’s no surprise — it happens with just about any major Hollywood action movie that hasn’t been available on one of the more popular streaming services. Watching it again will certainly remind people why Hammer was a star: He’s charismatic. He has solid comic timing. He excels at this kind of straight-man/stuffed-shirt role. And he brings an appealing sense of menace to certain kinds of characters — menace that may even be enhanced by all things we can’t unknow about him.

But as much as I love this movie, revisiting it is just yet another reminder of how thoroughly people tend to abuse power, fame, and money, and weaponize them against everyone else. And that’s just an exhausting thing to be reminded of every time we turn around, particularly in a country that so openly and slavishly worships all three of these things.

I did rewatch one scene from The Man From U.N.C.L.E., this weekend, though — a standout sequence midway through the movie where Kuryakin gets himself in trouble, and Cavill’s character Solo, from a safe vantage point, sighs and sits and leisurely listens to music and consumes a stolen sandwich, all while deciding whether to help Hammer’s character out of the situation he’s put himself in. I’m right there with him, looking at Armie Hammer’s attempted comeback and trying to sort out whether I can return to his movies in good conscience. If only this wasn’t a choice we keep having to make for ourselves, again and again and again.