Film Reviews

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Soundtrack Review

• 4th Aug 2015

Anyone familiar with the likes of the Ipcress File, the funk times and bizarre travels of the 60’s are likely to run with the feel of this one.

Daniel Permberton delivers a jazzed up score that delivers a strong flavour of the times as we perceive them with the right selection of instruments – drawing from familiar traits of the music subculture. And it, of course, it’s all played to a modern beat.

This is also a score you can buy and put on. There is so much here that contrasts vastly with what else you will find today in modern movie scores.  Favid Holmes funked up the world with his work on the Ocean’s movies – and Pemberton does likewise here with U.N.C.L.E. This is Pemberton’s first score with Guy Ritchie but you’d swear he was ripped right from the notes of Lock, Stock… and Snatch as there are echoes of those scores in here at work.

At its best it like John Barry and Henry Mancini had a baby together and that baby came home with straight A’s.

There is also room it seems for half a dozen or so songs from the era also – including the likes of Solomon Burke, Louis Prima and Nina Simone.

This is colourful and full of character and well worth the buy.

Steven Hurst