I’m so conflicted about Armie Hammer

For almost a decade now, I’ve been checking in from time to time to see if Guy Ritchie’s 2015 spy film The man from UNCLE was available for casual streaming. As a spy film, 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 fun in theaters, but they rarely stick with me for long. The man from UNCLE has a certain kind of ensemble energy that neither of those films have. It’s also a film built around a few very specific, endlessly revisitable set pieces in a way that makes streaming it easier than owning a copy. So I was excited to see it finally hit Netflix on July 27 — except now I have to figure out what I think of Armie Hammer.

To summarize: Ritchie’s The man from UNCLE reboot of a 1960s TV series of the same name, and borrows its visual style from 1960s thrillers, particularly in its sharp, flashy costume designs. The plot concerns two 1960s spies — CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Hammer) — who are first pitted against each other in the field and then forced to work together to stop a nuclear threat. From the start, they despise each other, at one point trashing a run-down bathroom while fighting. Later, they limit the violence to verbal jabs. They are absolutely vicious about this conflict, hurling insults at each other’s countries, bodies, and brains, and both grow grumpy or squirm whenever the other lets out a particularly timely zinger.

There are women in this film too — Alicia Vikander as Gaby, a state asset they both have to protect, and Elizabeth Debicki (recently memorably in Maxxine) as the villain, a Nazi-sympathizing sociopath. Both do their best to contribute to the too-cool-for-school-spy-antique vibe of the 60s. Debicki has a particularly great, spy-movie-classic scene with Cavill, where they try to outsmart and seduce each other. Vikander has a harder time as a character who’s largely stuck in the victim/prize-to-win role, with a particularly questionable scene where she tries to seduce Kuryakin, only to be a jerk about being under his protection.

But they both still form the backdrop to the real show in The Man from UNCLE — two sculpted, dangerous men trading non-stop 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 build toward a heavily foreshadowed Prisoner’s Dilemma moment in which one or both of them will have to choose whether to betray the other.

I love everything about Cavill and Hammer’s performances, and how they’re presented in this film, as equals in radically different modes, and as spy movie exemplars with just enough vulnerability under their masks. Ritchie and co-writer Lionel Wigram let Solo be a smirking, superior bastard until he sees what Kuryakin can do as an opponent, at which point he’s genuinely nervous. They have a Legolas-and-Gimli pout about who’s better at stealth infiltration, and who has better techniques or equipment. Even in the inevitable Bond-derived capture-and-torture sequence, Solo falls grimly silent in the face of a monologuing villain, clearly nervous about the prospect of terror and death, rather than reacting by laughing and joking at his captor.

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

Photo: Daniel Smith, Warner Bros. Pictures/Everett Collection

When a movie star suffers a major public fall from grace, whether 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 “If we boycotted their output, we’d be unfairly disadvantaging everyone else who worked on this project.” Or “At most, he’d get two cents if I stream this movie, so… whatever.” I’ve never really felt comfortable with any of those arguments, all of which feel more like dodges than decisions about how to deal with an artist’s behavior in the real world.

And I also feel uncomfortable about some aspects of the Hammer scandal. His career imploded in 2021 when a former partner posted on Instagram revealing that he had been texting 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 No charges were ever filed due to lack of evidenceHammer has maintained that fantasies are just fantasies, and that the horrific events his ex-partners described did indeed occur, but they were part of negotiated, consensual BDSM scenes.

I have complicated feelings about all of this, and they clash immediately. There’s no easy way to reconcile my distaste for the kink-shaming and invasion of privacy in this case with my frustration with victim blaming and the culture of disbelief surrounding women who expose the bad behavior of powerful men. Or my distaste for the prurient, gleefully funny, endlessly self-indulgent interest the media and social media users took in Hammer’s graphic, violent lyrics about breaking a partner’s bones and drinking her blood.

I didn’t want to have this window into Armie Hammer’s mind, or his sex life. But I also don’t want to give him a free pass with a nonchalant, “Well, it’s a he-said-she-said situation.” I have sympathy for 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 that involve people’s private relationships, and especially their sex lives, I personally believe that any kind of objective truth is impossible to achieve because all the participants have experienced the same events so differently. (A point recently made by the recent Best Picture nominee Anatomy of a Fall (explores explicitly and with many fascinating nuances.)

Photo: Daniel Smith, Warner Bros. Pictures/Everett Collection

Most of the time, at least in a case like this, I remind myself that I have no power to influence the outcome, and that no one needs another chattering voice in the mix, impersonating a celebrity or complete stranger. I’m not on a jury. I’m not forced to have an opinion about who wronged whom the most. And I recognize that while people (and the internet hordes in particular) like a black-and-white, good-versus-evil narrative — like, for example, The man from UNCLEin which dour but heroic patriots team up to fight literal nuclear-armed Nazis — the real world is almost never so simple.

The Armie Hammer issue is a bit more complicated at the moment, as he seems to be floating a trial balloon for a comeback. After a few years of near-invisibility, after losing his representation and his existing contracts, he is suddenly back in the news with some extensive interviews with carefully chosen interlocutors: Bill Maher and Piers Morgan, men Hammer could absolutely count on to give him a reassuring pat on the back and sympathy for “the dishonesty of the woke crowd”, his “Well, I hardly “my initials carved on her hip” delay, and not really questioning his version of the story. Uncle’s Man finally hitting the streaming service after almost 10 years, just as Hammer comes out of hiding… the timing feels a little odd, to say the least.

But a Netflix premiere also seems far too small to serve as a test balloon for gauging how many people remember or care about the allegations against Hammer, beyond remembering the memes and cannibal jokes. The interviews are far more meaningful — and given how much they focus on Hammer downplaying the allegations against him, they’re much more of a step toward a rehab tour and a return to acting. He’s said all the requisite things on the Hollywood comeback checklist — that he learned from the experience, that losing his fame and fortune did him good because it taught him who his real friends were and kept his ego in check. He’s said the whole scandal was a net positive for himHowever, I’d be very surprised if that stops him from returning to Hollywood if a second act is a possibility.

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures/Everett Collection

After only a few days on Netflix, The man from UNCLE is already in the Top 10 Most Streamed Movies . That’s no surprise — it happens to nearly every major Hollywood action film that wasn’t available on one of the most popular streaming services. Rewatching it is sure to remind people why Hammer was a star: He’s charismatic. He has solid comedic timing. He excels in these kinds of straight-man/stuffed-shirt roles. And he brings an appealing sense of menace to certain kinds of characters — menace that’s perhaps amplified by all the things we can’t forget about him.

But as much as I love this movie, rewatching it is just another reminder of how thoroughly people abuse power, fame and money and use it against everyone else. And that’s just a tiring thing to be. reminded of each time We turn aroundespecially in a country that worships these three things so openly and slavishly.

I rewatched one scene The man from UNCLEthis weekend, though — a notable sequence midway through the film where Kuryakin gets himself into trouble, and Cavill’s character Solo, from a safe vantage point, sighs and calmly listens to music and eats a stolen sandwich while deciding whether to help Hammer’s character out of the situation he’s gotten himself into. I’m all in, watching Armie Hammer’s attempted comeback and trying to figure out if I can go back to his films in good conscience. If only this wasn’t a choice we’d have to make for ourselves over and over again.