My favorite modern spy movie is finally on Netflix, and I’m so conflicted about it

polygon.com:

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