Directed by Matthew Vaughn, Argylle is a plot-twist-obsessed spy action comedy that never quite captures the fun of the Kingsman movies.
Matthew Vaughn clearly loves spy movies almost as much as he loves making fun of them — why else would even his take on X-Men (First Class) borrow so many pages from late-60s Bond? And Vaughn arguably perfected his pristine formula for the well-executed spy romp with Kingsman: The Secret Service nearly 10 years ago, which primarily succeeded because it blended slick, stylish action choreography with just the right singe of comedy, even down to its casting. With Argylle, Vaughn appears ready to reinvent himself once again with a denser script by Jason Fuchs and an even more satirical twist on the genre that doesn’t just lampoon spy movies (like his own) but also airport spy novels. That is, until, the movie basically drops all of that partway through and essentially transforms into a PG-13 Kingsman movie.
“I certainly hope you dance as well as you dress.”
The good news is that Argylle is still mostly good, at least on its own terms. The film opens with a prototypical prologue that would would fit right in with a Kingsman sequel (let’s just not discuss The King’s Man prequel for the time being). Argylle (Henry Cavill) is a dashing spy with a noticeably cartoonish haircut and equally cartoonish sidekicks (John Cena and Ariana DeBose) on a vaguely bland spy mission with a femme fatale (Dua Lipa) and a chase scene across Greece directly poking at the side of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies. Just an aside, if the Kingsman movies were all about lampooning James Bond, then Argylle appears gun-ready to take aim at Ethan Hunt from the get-go.
It turns out, however, that all these glaring spy tropes are indeed glaring spy tropes because they’re ripped straight from a bestselling thriller novel written by Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a timid author who lives by a lake with her cat Alfie and struggles quite a bit with social anxiety. Particularly when it comes to romance, something her doting mother (Catherine O’Hara) snipes her for often. Her life changes in a big way when a group of actual spies start hunting her because a lot of details from her books have been shockingly close to reality, to the point where she’s considered a liability by a rogue agency with an unhinged director (Bryan Cranston).
“I need her to write the next chapter.”
Elly’s only defense comes in the form of the scraggly Aidan (Sam Rockwell), the only real-world spy who actually wants to help her. Aidan recruits the reluctant Elly on a new kind of mission, one where she has to overcome her writer’s block in order to help him find a thing that will do something else that only sort of makes sense in the moment of watching this movie but escapes your brain about as quickly as it arrives.
It’s a winning premise, the kind of throwback buddy action comedy Vaughn himself must have adored during the 80s (Lethal Weapon, especially). And I have to credit Argylle with never being content to overdo the joke. The film repeatedly turns its own self on its head, almost to a fault, to the point where I genuinely had to wonder if this is a perfect case study in a film having too many twists. Yup, it’s possible.
The difficulty here is pinpointing exactly what Vaughn and his team were really after. By the end, we get some generic moral of the story as it relates to knowing who you really are and trusting your instincts, sure. But all that appears secondary to the film trying so hard to “wow” us without actually wowing us. It’s a film held back strongly by some basic filmmaking execution, particularly when it comes to the action and special effects, which are staged and conceived well (the two penultimate action scenes are wonderfully original) but the CGI and stuntwork just don’t deliver. That first Kingsman movie came out in 2015 and doesn’t look nearly as unpolished.
“It’s time for you to meet the real Agent Argylle.”
So by the end, it’s hard not to wish you’d just rewatched the first two Kingsman movies, which were so much more assured of themselves and finely-tuned to every beat of every movement. On the other hand, there’s something charmingly sloppy about Argylle‘s more slap-dash approach to showing people punch and kick each other…that is until (again) the movie falls back into the over-the-top Kingsman style, just with less bite because (again) it’s PG-13. People get shot and blown up a lot in a movie that is frighteningly squeamish when it comes to blood, even for PG-13.
It also doesn’t help that the film clocks in at 140 minutes, yet also pays some short shrift to a few of the big names in its cast. I’m still not entirely sure why the film bothered to cast Cena, DeBose, Lipa, and Samuel L. Freakin’ Jackson unless it just simply plans to give them more to do in the sequel of this intended trilogy. Fortunately, Howard is a thrilling protagonist who plays the straight character with infectious energy and Rockwell is a nice, cheeky counterpart who gets to show off his action chops for once, even if it is an overblown farce.
And yes, there’s a cat in the bag, and you shouldn’t let the cat out of the bag, get it? I’m not complaining, though, since I firmly believe even middling movies deserve some kind of nonsensical mascot and sense of identity. Argylle itself just has a secret identity, at least when it comes to the movie it really wants to be.
Argylle opens in theaters on February 2. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures and Apple Original Films. Read more articles by Jon Negroni here.
REVIEW RATING
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Argylle - 6.5/10
6.5/10
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts. He hosts the podcasts Thank God for Movies, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
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