2024 | PG-13 | starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Henry Cavill, John Cena, Dua Lipa, Richard E. Grant, Catherine O’Hara | directed by Matthew Vaughn | 2 h 19m | 1 out of 5 stars |
Argylle is a special kind of mess. A movie as frustrating as it is visually dazzling, packed with talent fumbling through a ridiculous story and a perfect storm train wreck of unoriginal and bad ideas. Following, The Lost City, it is another movie where an author finds themselves in their own books because their research expertise has turned out to be more true than they knew and now real bad guys are chasing them down. This won’t be the first movie we’ll see this year that is trying to fix its narrative issues by calling attention to them in a very meta, self-referential way.
The author here is Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) who writes spy novels starring her chief protagonist Argylle (Henry Cavill), his partner Wyatt (John Cena) and temptress villain Lagrange (Dua Lipa). Soon mysterious spies start coming after her in real life sending her on the run and into the reluctant care of Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell) while the two try to figure out what she would write next as her next book unfolds before them.
Like The Lost City, Argylle has a broadness to it that suggests it doesn’t really care about ribbing the more deep cutting cliches of the spy genre, which I would argue is the only reason to make a meta genre movie like this instead of just making an honest-to-goodness spy movie. It is to the enduring charm of self-aware movies like Scream and The Cabin in the Woods that they actually love the genres they are playing with. Otherwise, you’re just wearing it around like a costume. Besides, director Matthew Vaughn already went down this path with the more knowing spy film Kingsman: The Secret Service.
Even without looking for holes and applying logic to what should be a action-packed good time, Argylle almost immediately falls part on it’s own logic. Very soon I was questioning the logic of a top level spy agency (lead by Bryan Cranston) that is sending assassins after a meek cat-lady author because they are convinced that her books are literally coming to life. Because the movie gives us no leg to stand on and the foundational premise makes no sense, this results in scene after scene after scene where what the characters are all saying, doing and how they are reacting to the action around them is utterly baffling. Where a beloved family member is murdered in front of Elly and she hardly blinks over it while the movie races to something else. In one scene, Rockwell’s agent dukes it out with bad guys on a train and we see Elly’s POV imagining her fictional character Argylle doing the fighting instead. But why? An excuse to give Henry Cavill more screen time at the expense of the always charming Rockwell? To bait-and-switch the audience into thinking they’re watching a Henry Cavill arms-reloading spy movie only to pull the rug out after the first scene and go “he’s fake”. All of these competing interests add up to a complete mess.
After a whopping hour of nonsense, the movie finally explains itself with an increasingly preposterous series of reveals. The problem is this: In an attempt to be all things to all people, writer and perpetrator of this crime, Jason Fuchs doesn’t give the movie a red herring plot to grab onto. Think about Hot Fuzz for a moment. Before we get to the final reveal the movie has a solid plausible red herring story that could have been the solution just as easily. Think about the twist in Fight Club and the reason that movie works so well is that it also works so well without said twist. Same for The Sixth Sense. In all 3 of these cases before we get to the final reveal we’ve been given a fully-formed and satisfying story that still works on its own level. Your reveal should take the movie to another level through clever misdirection. It can’t just be… nothing.
The final act of the film is the kind of big bombastic CGI action spectacle that Vaughn has pulled off so well in the past with Kick Ass and Kingsman. Here it is to service Howard as an action hero, putting knife blades on her shoes and skating through oil with a machine gun. All of this nonsense would work if the movie were more fun, if it were funny, if the action was well staged or if Howard and Rockwell had any chemistry. Instead we get slow motion shoot-outs set against ironic musical cues and broad jokes about a CGI indestructible kitty – while we wait for it to attack a bad guy at a crucial moment in the third act, because this is just that kind of movie. The action scenes against ironic music is my biggest pet peeve of all recent movie tropes. It’s also abundant in the Ryan Gosling/Emily Blunt adaptation of The Fall Guy. It’s the signal to the audience that we don’t care to try to make this exciting and you shouldn’t care either.
Argylle could have used a whole lot less of that back-patting irony and a whole lot more effort into making a very real spy movie. I absolutely hated it. One of the most obnoxious, hollow and creatively bankrupt big studio films I’ve seen in a while.