Argylle movie review: just *argh*

Am I going crazy?

No, wait, don’t answer that: of course I’m going crazy. We all are. But I mean specifically, in the case of Argylle, this new action (alleged) comedy. Because I startled myself awake the morning after my screening the evening before with the shocking realization that nothing in the trailer — which has been ubiquitous and inescapable at cinemas for months now — is actually in the damn movie.

Or is it? Maybe some of it is? The movie itself had already faded from memory, mere hours later, it’s that blah, though it’s frantic not to be taken as so. But the trailer is, alas, more seared into my brain than the movie it wanted to sell me, to the point that less than half a day later, I wasn’t quite able to separate the two. It’s like how you can’t be quite sure whether you genuinely remember something from your early childhood or if you’re just recalling people talking about it.

But this is more insidious. I’m literally gaslighting myself over this. I’m doubting my sanity. Not enough to buy a ticket and go see the movie again to settle the issue, of course. I’m not gonna pay to subject myself to this cinematic trial again. Maybe when it comes to Apple TV+…

Because you know what? Whether my memory is accurate on a granular level doesn’t matter. Many movie trailers include scenes that don’t end up in the final film — trailers are often cut before production has even wrapped — but even then, those trailers are usually broadly representative of what you’ll see in the cinema. (There is a new and worrying trend in which trailers for movie musicals hide the fact that they’re musicals. But that’s a rant for another day.) That Argylle trailer, though? I don’t think I’ve seen a more deceptive tease for a movie ever. (Never fear! Argylle is not a musical.)

And yet, even that wouldn’t matter — or would at least be forgivable — if what we did get was worth our time.

Friends, it is not. Not at all.

Argylle is absolutely not, no matter how much the trailer insists, a cheeky Henry Cavill–kinda-sorta-as–James Bond chunk of delightfully winking spy nonsense. Cavill is barely in the film (and when he is, the film does him no favors). Also barely appearing: John Cena (The Suicide Squad, Fighting with My Family) as his muscly sidekick, which is downright criminal, given Cena’s now-proven comedic chops. Pop star Dua Lipa as their slinky-lady-villain opponent is also barely in the film, so any of her fans — and why cast her if not to draw in her fans? — hoping for a more meaty performance after her brief screen debut in Barbie will be disappointed. Also here for the paycheck: Bryan Cranston (Isle of Dogs, The Disaster Artist), Catherine O’Hara (When Marnie Was There, Frankenweenie), Ariana DeBose (I.S.S.) and Samuel L. Jackson (The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), the latter fully embracing his phoning-it-in-because-he-can status.

What we get instead is a sad-sack Bryce Dallas Howard (Rocketman, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) — honestly, director Matthew Vaughn does not flatter any of his cast — as spy-novel writer Elly Conway, who gets caught up in supposedly real-life espionage shenanigans as a tagalong to Sam Rockwell’s Aidan Wilde, a real-life spy. Stuff she’s invented for her hugely bestselling books turns out to be actually real, Aidan informs her as he shanghais her into adventures ’n’ shit, to the chagrin of the bad guys. Somebody’s worried, anyway. It’s all a bit of a muddle. Even Rockwell’s (The Bad Guys, Trolls: World Tour) trademarked impudence is smothered.

In between unconvincing CGI bullshit and frenetic fight scenes that seem to exist merely as a showcase for Vaughn’s (Kingsman: The Golden Circle, X-Men: First Class) overstuffed manic style, we’re asked to ponder what’s real and what isn’t: Elly keeps seeing, in the midst of the frenzy, flashes of Cavill’s Agent Argylle. But is there a “real” Argylle, and if so, who could it be?

The marketing for the film implores us not to “let the cat out of the bag” once we know the secret. (There’s a running “joke” about Elly’s pet cat, which is along for the shenanigans in one of those appalling pet-carrier backpacks that you should never ever put a cat in. The movie leans hard into it, and it’s the most cynical kind of distraction, a desperate attempt to, I dunno, create Internet memes, perhaps, without having the teensiest understanding of what makes cat content, or anything else, go viral online.) But the secret is simultaneously completely obvious and utterly ridiculous along multiple vectors. Talking about it once we’re beyond the worry over spoilers won’t even be any fun, just a tedious mopping-up task.

The marketing for the film also wants to get us excited by how this is “from the twisted mind of Matthew Vaughn.” Spoiler: There is nothing in the least bit twisted about Argylle. Unless the word twisted is being deployed here as a strange catchall for crass, confused, and charmless, in which case this may be the Matthew Vaughn–est movie yet. The inept script, by Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman, Ice Age: Continental Drift), makes zero distinction between the “fictional” spy malarkey of the adventures of Cavill’s (Justice League, Mission: Impossible – Fallout) Argylle and the “real” exploits that Elly finds herself in the midst of. Surely good fun entertaining comedy, perhaps even some bittersweet pathos, could be mined from the contrast between over-the-top cinematic depictions of spy stuff — the movie opens with a wannabe-Bondian scene of Cavill’s Argylle in action before revealing to us that this is merely an excerpt from the book Elly is writing — and the down-to-earth reality of authentic, unexciting spycraft that Rockwell’s “real spy” would be muddling through. It’s not just that Vaughn stages every single thing that happens here with his usual goes-to-11 hyperactive vulgarity, though he does. It’s that a story about the difference between fiction and reality has decided that reality is just as monotonously cartoonish as, ahem, a blockbuster movie that is rumored to have cost $200 million to produce and yet somehow looks cheap as hell.

If Elly’s “real life” is as much cinematic balderdash as the fiction she invents, what happens if we come up another level of the Argylle Inception? Yup, Vaughn fumbles the smug meta he brings into the real–real-world level, too. His movie is purportedly inspired by a novel by a writer called “Elly Conway,” by book four in a series of spy thrillers, although the first book has only just been published, in conjunction with the film’s release. As with trailers that feature scenes not in the movie, the years-long schedules of Hollywood productions certainly can and do culminate in movies based on books that have not yet been published — movie rights are often shopped by publishing houses as soon as manuscripts are acquired, which is typically 18 months or more before publication. But it seems vanishingly unlikely that a Book Four from a completely unknown author would even be written at this point in the entire process, never mind snagging such a sweet and lucrative deal.

Is the author unknown, though? There’s a “conspiracy” theory that Taylor Swift(!) wrote the book. There’s another that the first version of the film’s script was written by JK Rowling, and that the plot was about “JK Rowling” discovering that the wizarding world actually exists; this seems to have grown out of the fact that the director stated a while back that he was inspired by that concept. Vaughn has been insisting that the book is the real deal, but as with every single other aspect of this movie, it doesn’t matter, even now that the identity of “Elly Conway” has been revealed (and it’s as underwhelming as the “secret” of Argylle). There is nothing behind this vacuous multitentacled exercise in pop-culture marketing but flatulent hot air.

more films like this:
• Romancing the Stone [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Disney+ UK]
• Spy [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Max US | Disney+ UK]