Argylle Review
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
When the trailers for Argylle boast of a movie “from the twisted mind of Matthew Vaughn,” there’s something they’re not telling you (besides its actual twists): Despite the advertising, this is the sweetest-natured movie Vaughn has made in ages. (Maybe that is the twist.) This is not to say that Vaughn’s latest semi-comic thriller has a lack of onscreen violence or a low body count. Far from it. Dozens, possibly hundreds of faceless characters die violent deaths. But given that Vaughn has spent the past decade exploring the cheeky, sometimes edgelord-y world of Kingsman, a movie where Bryce Dallas Howard plays a mild-mannered author of spy novels drawn into a real-world espionage plot has an advantage in gentle charm, no matter how many kill shots or fatal stabbings it contains.
Unfortunately, Vaughn eventually manages to blow this considerable lead, as he riffs on James Bond-style super-spies by imitating Bond-movie bloat minus production values or wit. That chintziness makes it tricky to buy into the extraordinary success of novelist Elly Conway (Howard), who has just published her fourth bestselling book about the Bondian Agent Argylle (embodied onscreen by Henry Cavill with a weirdly triangular brush-coif). On a train trip, she’s intercepted by Aidan (Sam Rockwell), who claims to be a real spy hoping to glean some additional intel from her next eerily predictive text – and protect her from various bad guys hoping to do the same. This initial hook is reminiscent of Romancing the Stone, and then Argylle gets a little trippier: When Aidan engages in some Kingsman-like hand-to-hand-and-also-guns combat in a train car, Elly keeps seeing flashes of her fictional hero, as the movie cuts between Cavill and Rockwell executing the same slick moves. Has her creation come to life, is she controlling reality, or is something else entirely afoot? It’s a concept worthy of a Michel Gondry project, potentially exploring how we express or limit our worldview through creativity.
Disappointingly, Vaughn has no such ambitions on his mind, even while piling on the twists, fake-outs, and characters – well, “characters” might be generous, but certainly big-name talent, including Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, Ariana DeBose, John Cena, Dua Lipa, and a well-into-his-performing-from-a-chair-era Samuel L. Jackson. As Elly and Aidan hop from green screen to green screen, a deadening repetition sets in: Aidan insists that Elly must try some kind of outlandishly dangerous stunt, Elly balks, Aidan insists, and then the CGI kicks in for a few minutes of impossible, weightless action.
There is a reason that the fantasy action of Elly’s books and the real-world spy shenanigans look so similar – but there’s no mandate that their similarity must be rooted in such visual junk. Occasionally, especially during its final stretch, Vaughn pushes the cartooniness so far that the movie attains a kind of deranged grandeur, like a Kingsman sequel with a touch of Baz Luhrmann. More often, the movie gets stuck on its clunky editing (the transitions between Cavill and Rockwell are particularly heavy-handed when they should be light and playful) and careless plotting that drops characters in new, fake-looking locations without much momentum. The suspense starts leaking out of the story just when it’s supposed to be ramping up.
A spy picture this relatively lighthearted doesn’t need to generate white-knuckle suspense to work, so it’s important to note that Argylle largely fails as a charm machine, too. Howard and Rockwell make an appealing team, united by a gameness for the weirdness the movie tries to throw at them – and Vaughn at least has the good sense to let Rockwell dance repeatedly. But the screenplay by Jason Fuchs fails to supply either of star with a single good line. The whole thing feels like an overlong first draft without any darlings to kill. There are other movies Vaughn and Fuchs rip off, too, though specifying which ones would spoil the serviceable (if not exactly mind-blowing) plot twists.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Argylle is that throughout its derivative, distended spy adventure, it does manage to nevertheless feel like a passion project for Vaughn. It’s premiering in theaters before heading to Apple TV+, and it has that carte-blanche-from-a-streamer energy, excitedly creating a new world and hinting at baffling new installments to come in a mid-credits scene. Yet for an expensive indulgence, Argylle is shockingly drab (every color but gold appears muted) and unpolished; the passion derives from the fact that it got made at all. This would-be wild ride tries to make heart-eyes at its own absurdity. Instead, it shrugs and reverts to upping the body count.
