Early in director Matthew Vaughn’s abysmal new spy adventure, Argylle, an attendee at a book release Q&A for the new spy novel by Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) asks her if she’s a spy. As he points out, many great spy novelists, like Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and John le Carré, turned out to be spies themselves, and the depth of understanding within their books exists in hers. If you truly can identify a spy in hiding by how they write about spies, then it’s never been clearer that Vaughn is as keyed into the ins and outs of spycraft as the cat that appears in just about every single promotional image for this film.
If you’ve missed the punishing advertising onslaught of Argylle, let’s get you up to speed: After churning out several volumes of her hit spy novel series of the same name, Elly discovers that her books have become a thorn in the side of the international espionage community because her work seems to be predicting the exact details of its clandestine affairs. Elly’s fictional and real worlds collapse, leaving her seeing the goofball spy Aidan (Sam Rockwell, who begins the film with a cartoonishly terrible beard, but shaves off-screen immediately after his first scene) in one moment and, with a blink, imagining him as the Argylle of her mind’s eye (Henry Cavill, given extremely light duty). With Aidan and her beloved cat, Alfie, by her side, she crosses the world in search of the truth about who the real Argylle is.
If the “genre writer gets sucked into the world of the genre they write about” story line feels a little stale, Argylle will do absolutely nothing to refresh it for you. At its heart, Argylle wants so badly to be a stylish, modernized Romancing the Stone, but doesn’t even ascend to the campy, charming heights of the (frankly, underrated) Sandra Bullock/Channing Tatum vehicle The Lost City. What should have been a tight-90 with a killer twist that builds up into a satisfying climax is a bloated, 140-minute slog that delivers the details of who the real Agent Argylle is far too early, and then resorts to mind-numbing plot contrivances and an honest-to-God deus ex machina to try to keep you interested for the remaining film. The fact that the advertising for Argylle leaned so heavily on the existence of a big plot twist should have been the largest possible canary in the coal mine; even M. Night Shyamalan, the maestro of the unexpected turn, doesn’t feel the need to tell people not to spoil his hard work by blabbing to their friends.
Simply put, almost nothing about Argylle really works. For starters, writer Jason Fuchs, most famous for having cut his teeth writing the fourth Ice Age film and the story for Wonder Woman, seems to have been given carte blanche by Vaughn to do whatever he wanted, with absolutely no regard for academic concepts like “pacing” or “flow.” As for the director, it feels like Vaughn picked up scraps from the Kingsman series and hacked them into what he thought people liked about those films. It gives us romantic story beats for charming babes like Rockwell and Howard, but the characters’ interactions often feel so wooden, it’s hard to imagine really rooting for them. There’s a killer cast, but most of the actors — Henry Cavill, John Cena, Dua Lipa, Bryan Cranston, the hammy-as-hell Catherine O’Hara — are so underutilized that you’ll almost wish you had more John Cena in your movie. The worst is Samuel L. Jackson, who spends the majority of his one-location time onscreen alone, in a room, watching basketball, waiting for a file to download. What dirt does Vaughn have on this man?
If there’s a real faltering point to Argylle, though, it’s just that it’s boring — and when it’s not dull, it’s at least a little bit irritating. Spy thrillers with hot A-listers shouldn’t leave you daydreaming about what you need to do at work the next day. Even the action sequences suffer from either being too little (the apartment building in London, where Elly grapples with learning to stomp men’s skulls in) or way, way too much, like the multicolored-smoke shootout shown in the trailers and the soon-to-be infamous “oil skating” sequence, both of which take their eye-wateringly zany premises and dial them up too loud to be enjoyable. Vaughn knows how to work well in violent maximalism — It’s basically been his bread and butter since Kick-Ass, but by the time we hit the two-hour mark, even the best stuff feels like it has been smothered by the worst parts.
It feels silly to take a movie as fluffy and meaningless as Argylle and attempt to use it as an example of Hollywood’s tendency to dump unholy amounts of money into the vanity projects of people who haven’t made a truly good film since their careers began. Then again, the budget for Argylle was $200 million, and Vaughn is already planning on turning the film into a trilogy that crosses over with the Kingsman universe, which speaks volumes about those tendencies. Argylle should be a meaningless romp, but it’s not even fun enough to imagine a crap-to-camp success story like M3GAN; there’s nothing to elevate it above the type of slop that studios dump in the cold of January. The studio wants you to know not to “let the cat out of the bag” about who Argylle really is, but if you respect your own time, you’ll read the Wikipedia summary and watch Romancing the Stone instead.
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
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