Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures / Daniel Smith

Ten years later and some of us still cannot get over everyone watching Henry Cavill in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and carrying on as if nothing happened. Like, hello? A spy film this fun turned up with Cavill at the wheel, yet nobody raised enough fuss for a sequel. Just rude!

The film was released in 2015 with a reported $75 million budget and a worldwide gross of around $110 million. What followed was years of sequel talk with no sequel. One film was all we got.

But let’s talk about the main attraction, Henry Cavill, who plays Napoleon Solo, a CIA agent as a man who never seems desperate to prove how cool he is. Someone threatens him, and he looks inconvenienced. A plan starts falling apart and, ugh, there is barely a flicker.

Armie Hammer’s Illya Kuryakin gives him a problem he cannot charm into submission. Illya is KGB, this is 1963, and the Cold War is not exactly known for workplace harmony, so asking these two men to cooperate feels like inviting trouble into the room, then acting shocked when it sits down.

Gaby Teller, played by Alicia Vikander, gives the mission its centre. Her father is a German nuclear scientist believed to be involved with a criminal group building a nuclear weapon. Solo gets Gaby out of East Berlin while Illya tries to stop him, and their next order is pure comedy: work together. Can this get any better?

The mission takes them to Italy, where Elizabeth Debicki’s Victoria Vinciguerra enters the picture. Yes, the nuclear threat matters, but be serious: the reason people come back has nothing to do with uranium. The pull is Solo and Illya getting under each other’s skin until the mission starts feeling like an excuse, with their feud as the point.

And the clothes? Come on. Costume designer Joanna Johnston drew from fashion across the 1960s without locking the wardrobe to 1963, while Illya’s turtlenecks reference David McCallum, who played him in the original television series. That detail turns a handsome costume choice into a piece of character history.

The casting story has its own twist. Tom Cruise had the Solo role before leaving to focus on Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which gave Henry Cavill the part, and thank god for that. Cruise would have brought his own energy, no doubt, but Cavill’s version works because he seems amused by Solo’s vanity rather than trapped inside it.

If this has been gathering dust in your Netflix queue, what are you doing? Watch it. We may get no sequel, but the first film leaves one question hanging over the credits: who looked at this setup and decided one was enough?