Director Matthew Vaughn is capable of some pretty incredible work (Kick-Ass, the first Kingsman movie, X-Men: First Class) and he’s amassed a fun collection of regular actors who support his visions, no matter how twisted or misguided they may be. His latest work, Argylle, is maybe his most ambitious film to date, but size isn’t everything. In fact, it’s the sheer excess of plot that ultimately crushes his tale of spies, both real and imagined, in this tale of author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), whose spy novels and their alarming accuracy get her into a heap of trouble.
Borrowing heavily from everything from Romancing the Stone to Sandra Bullock’s The Lost City, Argylle finds Elly imagining a world of spies that look like Henry Cavill (as the titular, fictional character), John Cena (as the trusted sidekick), Ariana DeBose (as their person in the chair), and even Dua Lipa (as the latest book’s villain, who is also a great dancer). As she’s on tour with her latest work, Elly lets it slip that her next book in the series is arriving sooner than her fans think. In fact, it’s basically done. But her mother (Catherine O’Hara) thinks the new book’s cliffhanger ending is a copout and demands she wrap things up more neatly by writing one more chapter. It turns out that there are a lot of interested parties in the next chapter of her just-finished work, because her stories tend to predict or mirror real-life events going on in the spy world. A whole host of intelligence agents begins hunting her down to find out the location of a certain thumb-drive of information, because where her Agent Argylle goes, the real world apparently follows.
One of these spies, supposedly on the side of good, is Aidan (Sam Rockwell), whose primary objective is protecting Elly (and her cat in a suitcase, Alfie, that she can’t go anywhere without) and helping complete her novel so he can find out where this data is hidden. There are a few decent action sequences here and there, and Rockwell is doing some of his finest Sam Rockwell-style acting, but for most of the film, Howard is a screeching dud who would rather yell at Rockwell than do anything productive in order to save her own life. To make matters worse, director Vaughn uses a visual gag that basically amounts to Rockwell and Cavill changing places every time Elly blinks, because she can’t imagine that a schlub like Aidan could possibly be the kind of spy she dreamed up in the character of Argylle. It’s visually jarring and takes us out of the moment every time he uses it, which is in many of the early action sequences.
Also turning up for a little supporting color are Bryan Cranston as the head of a global spy syndicate, Sofia Boutella as a point of contact known as the Keeper of Secrets (she doesn’t get to fight, so I barely cared she was in this), and Samuel L. Jackson as the former CIA head and Aidan’s boss. There comes a certain point in the plot where I can’t really talk about any of the twists and turns (and there are thousands of them), but after a while, I stopped caring. It’s all too much, all in the service of doing little more than letting the film spin its wheels, extending its running time (this thing runs damn near two hours and 20 minutes), and attempting to turn Howard into an action star.
Explain something to me: why is this approach to the spy genre better than simply telling a skillful tale of espionage? How does that extra layer of story make Argylle a better movie? The truth is, it doesn’t, and a part of me thinks screenwriter Jason Fuchs knows that. Instead, it makes it unnecessarily complex, full of secrets that only seem to be secrets to Elly, which I think is done in service of the comedic elements of the movie, very few of which are actually funny (with the exception of a few likely improvised zingers from Rockwell, who is the only performer that got me through this movie). At best, the film is a showcase for Rockwell; at its worst, Argylle is an overblown action movie that gives us very little we haven’t seen before (with the exception of the cat); most of the time, it’s aggressively mediocre.
To cap it all off, there’s a mid-credits scene that unexpectedly and pointlessly ties the movie to another franchise (you won’t have to bend your brain too much to figure out which one), and I was left speechless and more than a bit annoyed.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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