Argylle: Bells and Whistles Can’t Hide Silly Spy Caper’s Shortcomings
By Chris Knight
Rating: C-
What happened to director Matthew Vaughn? His career used to be all “pre.” His first feature, 2004’s Layer Cake, starred a pre-Bond Daniel Craig. His next, Stardust, gave us a pre-Homeland Claire Danes and a pre-Superman Henry Cavill.
Kick-Ass was a superhero parody when the entire MCU consisted of just two movies: Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. X-Men: Days of Future Past kicked off that franchise’s prequels with a bang.
Then came Kingsman: The Secret Service, a tolerable mashup of James Bond, Harry Palmer, Maxwell Smart and a few more besides. Nothing really new here, and even less in Vaughn’s next two films, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and The King’s Man.
Which brings us to Argylle, a spy comedy that, if the trailers are anything to go by, stars Bryce Dallas Howard and a computer-enhanced grey tabby cat.
The good news is that there’s a little less kitty-per-minute in the film’s two hours and 20 minutes than in the trailer’s two minutes 20 seconds. The bad news is that the film’s ideal running time is somewhere between those two time scales. Like the Kingsman outings, it’s way too long.
Howard stars as Elly Conway, a mousy writer (Those bangs! That sweater! Those mom jeans!) who has achieved fame and a devoted following thanks to her series of novels about a handsome secret agent named Argylle, played in goofy dramatizations of the books by Cavill. (I’ll be charitable and suggest that the bad special effects in the opening scene are meant to represent cheesy writing.)
Elly’s life takes a turn for the bizarre when she gets on a train to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara) and finds herself sitting opposite Aidan (Sam Rockwell), who claims to be her biggest fan before revealing that he is in fact a secret agent himself, sent to rescue her from a hoard of baddies straight out of one of her novels.
Straight out indeed. As Aiden explains, Elly’s books have been predicting real-world events in frighteningly precise detail, and now various spooks, snoops and sleuths are trying to track her down and pick her brains for the next twist in their own real-life story.
It’s all a little hard to believe, both for Elly and the audience. And while I won’t give away any of the film’s — let’s see, carry the three — 27 plot twists, suffice to say that not everything is at it may at first seem. Or at second. Or third. Or… well, you get the point.
Argylle has some heavy hitters in its cast, but some of them are barely there. Samuel L. Jackson has but one major scene, while Bryan Cranston’s one-note bad guy is a role he could play in his sleep, and John Cena is merely the personification of another of Elly’s characters.
No, most of the heavy lifting is done by Howard and Rockwell, as they go chasing after a MacGuffin and slowly realize they may have feelings for one another. Shades of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in 2022’s The Lost City, and it’s never a good sign when you take inspiration from an already uninspired film.
Argylle is not as dreadfully unwatchable as the Kingsman movies, but it is dolefully derivative, as if The Manchurian Candidate and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty had a baby, then abandoned it to be raised on The Planet of the Apes.
The screenplay, by Jason Fuchs, seems to be operating under the assumption that if it moves fast enough you won’t notice its flaws. Alas, creaky plot contrivances and odd scene changes (often accomplished by having Howard’s character doze off) are hard to hide, even when shot from a gun.
And I must dock points for the film’s use of the Beatles’ “Now and Then,” the group’s “final song,” famously released last November. For some reason in this film, it’s been “our song” for two of the characters for the past five-plus years. It’s puzzling and took me right out of the movie — not that I was much into it to begin with.
Up next for Vaughn? It’s back to the well with Kingsman: The Blue Blood, and The King’s Man: The Traitor King. And, if the box office obliges, a sequel to Argylle, I’d imagine. At least he won’t have any fresh Beatles songs to throw into that one.
Argylle. Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, and Henry Cavill. In theatres February 2.