Movie Review: ‘Argylle’

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, Henry Cavill, Sofia Boutella, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose, John Cena, Samuel L. Jackson

Plot: An author of a popular series of spy novels has her world turned on its head with the arrival of a real secret agent. He claims that her books are a bit close to the truth and she’s being targeted for information that she may have.

Review: It’s difficult to narrow down where things went so wrong with this one. You’ve got the director of Kingsman helming a comedy-action movie that riffs on the spy genre. You’ve got an all-star cast from a range of eras. This should be some harmless fun with mass appeal. This should have been a slam-dunk, but it’s such a jumbled and confusing shambles that it winds up being annoying rather than a romp. It falls flat on many big factors, and many more small ones.

The most obvious and immediate problem is what they’ve done to poor Henry Cavill. They must have gone out of their way to make him look as unappealing as he does here (comparatively, let’s not get carried away). The high top haircut and high neckline of his weird outfit simply do not work for him, and as he’s being presented as a smouldering, super-cool secret agent type it creates a disconnect. He looks less impressive or suave than Austin Powers, and Powers supposed to look like a clown. The fact that this movie is parodying an old genre that was parodied by Austin Powers 25 years ago – and the point at the time was that this genre had dated badly – it makes the entire concept seem dated.

So here’s the basic premise, as basic as we can get it. Elly Conway (Howard) is a reclusive writer who has achieved worldwide fame for her ‘Argylle’ series of spy novels. As she attempts to finish her latest book, she encounters a passenger on a train who claims to be a real secret agent named Aidan Wylde (Rockwell). She’s told that her books somehow predict what happens in the world of spies, and her villainous organisation The Division is not only real but on the hunt for her. Wylde’s bizarre claims quickly turn out to be true when Elly is attacked by assassins. As Wylde fights them off, Elly sees her mental image of Agent Argylle (Cavill) pulling off all the fight moves with panache.

Right here we run into some problems. When Aidan turns up he points out that real spies don’t look like Argylle because they need to blend in, and the assumption was that everything presented as fantastic and high-tech in the books while the real world is simple and grounded. This isn’t really the case, as Wylde dispatches his foes quickly and creatively in the same way Argylle would. We switch back and forth and back and forth between Wylde and Argylle so it’s clear that they’re just as skilled as each other. The only gag here seems to be that the real spy is not as attractive as the imaginary one, but still just as agile, strong, quick-thinking and charming. The speed at which we cut back and forth between Cavill and Rockwell makes it difficult enough, but there’s often little to distinguish them from each other. Adding a cutaway to Elly gawping and blinking confusedly doesn’t help either. Every second shot being a bystander overreacting to what they’re seeing does not make for an exciting action sequence.

Anyway, as we journey through various reveals and twists it becomes apparent that neither of these characters are much fun to be around. Elly alternates between looking bewildered and screaming, while Aidan keeps asking her to trust him while, at the same time, throwing her cat off a tall building. There’s an extended “joke” where he keeps insisting that she needs stomp a man’s head in, and he gets annoyed that she hesitates to stomp a man to death. I guess that it’s all supposed to make sense when you find out that Elly is an amnesiac spy herself and he was trying to snap her out of it, but at the time he just comes across as a monster.

So, yes…she’s the actual ‘Argylle’ and she’s been basing her novels on her suppressed memories. For a little while the movie plays around and goes back and forth on whether or not she’s back in secret agent mode, so when it does kick in for good it happens with uncertainty from the audience’s perspective. Now the entire set-up of Elly is moot, and she’s just Rachel Kylle and we’re supposed to be invested in the generic McGuffin of the moment. The gimmick of the imaginary Agent Argylle doesn’t have much bearing anymore, we’ve just got this romantic couple we’ve just met and expected to care about.

On that note, they use the Beatle’s song ‘Now and Then’ as a leitmotif throughout. It’s ‘their song’ from before Elly/Kylle got brainwashed and it’s something important that brings them together. Except that ‘Now and Then’ very famously only got released in 2023, and with nothing to suggest this takes place at some point in the future it left us feeling very confused. Again.

Argylle continues along this muddled path with more twists and turns as characters are revealed to be secret agents, double agents, brainwashed or programmed or whatever. There’s a stream of popular performers from John Cena to Samuel L. Jackson to Dua Lipa, with very few of them sharing scenes together. Poor Jackson seems to have spent most of his day in a room by himself. Having an ensemble cast only has value if they get the chance to bounce off one another. Eventually it comes down to slow-motion spinning around and shooting guns, and repeating this awful joke about dancing the ‘whirlybird’. This hilarious gag involves a person straddling another person’s face while keeping legs akimbo, and they spin around. This is worth repeating five or six times. Then Elly/Kylle goes back to writing spy novels.

The most common response to this movie is confusion. We’re confused about the logic of this movie, we’re confused as to which character we’re meant to care about and we’re confused as to why we should care about any of this. It’s not funny enough to work as a comedy and it’s not intriguing enough to be an action spy thriller. Even if you think it’s all wrapped up well, it ends with the ‘real Argylle’ turning up at a book signing. Up until this point, Elly was understood to be the real Argylle and the Cavill character was her mental image of the agent she once was…so why is Cavill turning up now with a mullet and different accent? This makes no sense whatsoever, that an imaginary man is real, and then they double down by revealing that THIS man, whoever he is, was also a member of Kingsmen.

Yeah, this is supposed to kick off a trilogy of movies, including a prequel, that would cross-over with Kingsman and a third, unseen series. Maybe just focus on getting one right at a time.

Rating: TWO out of TEN