Argylle
★
There’s a moment in the latter half of Matthew Vaughn’s “Argylle” in which a character refers to The Beatles’ “Now and Then,” a song released a short three months ago, as the song that defined their relationship five years prior. It’s a small, nitpicky goof that very easily could have not existed. Another song would fit just as snugly. But this was not an accidental oversight. The filmmakers got the rights to use a new, highly popular song, and it didn’t matter much to them that it serves as a direct contradiction. It’s a product of laziness. It reeks of a flippant “who cares?” attitude, and if that stench hadn’t reached you through the ninety-or-so minutes you had previously endured, it certainly will by this moment.
“Argylle” is atrocious. It follows Elly Conway, an introverted spy novelist famous for a series of stories centred around the heroic Agent Argylle. When the plot of her latest book begins to mirror the real-life events of a covert spy organization, she is reluctantly thrown into a globe-trotting espionage adventure alongside a genuine secret agent. She also has a cat with her. That’ll seem important; trust me, it isn’t.
Matthew Vaughn’s latest is deliriously high on its own supply. It is convoluted and overlong in a deliberate fashion. So prideful of its own perceived cleverness, it allows itself to indulge in plot twist upon plot twist until the act of keeping up with the story becomes a chore. Not to mention the film’s multiple fake-out climax’s, which get progressively more ridiculous. There is a so-bad-it’s-good quality to some of the film’s most baffling narrative choices, however, particularly a skating scene that left me howling. But the film overall plays like a first draft. Its structure feels improvised, like the film was written scene by scene without an outline, and most of the plot’s logic falls apart with minor critical thinking. And then of course the dialogue. I have never seen a film this unfunny be so convinced of its wit. Its attempts at comedy fall flat with cringe-inducing results, and its “cool spy talk” in the vein of Bond or Bourne read like the intentionally(?) pulpy slop in our protagonist’s espionage writing. The laziness behind frequently referring to the bad guys as “the bad guys” is just the tip of the CGI dagger.
But “Argylle” may have been bearable as a tongue-in-cheek send up of the spy genre had its ensemble cast found their footing. Unfortunately, no one looks like they know where they are or what they’re meant to be doing. Bryce Dallas Howard comes away mostly unscathed, and is in all fairness a likeable lead. But the film’s second half requires her to maintain a precarious balancing act that she fumbles with overdone, exaggerated theatricality. It’s just awkward to watch. Sam Rockwell, meanwhile, is consistently irritating as secret agent Aiden. He’s got the confident spy persona down, but speaks every line with the same cocky self-aware intonation. The film also manages to eke out dreadful performances from Bryan Cranston and Catherine O’Hara, who are typically quite reliable. The other Hollywood A-listers promised in the film’s marketing aren’t around long enough to register with any sort of impact. Henry Cavill is stone-faced and embarrassingly uncharismatic. Samuel L. Jackson shows up to watch the Lakers game and cackle gleefully like is second nature to him. John Cena has fewer lines than I have fingers to count them on, yet is still memorably disappointing. Ariana DeBose should get a new agent. And Dua Lipa is in the film so they can advertise her name on the poster, which should hopefully tell you what I thought of her performance.
The film is also a garish eyesore. Despite costing over $200 million, Matthew Vaughn’s film has the flat digital sterility of a car commercial, and frequently looks like a movie thrown together at the last minute. Truly, it looks like a film rebuilt in the computer. Extraordinarily few shots in “Argylle” are presented without clear VFX compositing, and it becomes apparent early on that much of what Vaughn didn’t care to plan during pre-production has been retroactively invented digitally after filming had wrapped. Backgrounds are obvious blue screen effects. Car chases and explosions and death-defying stunts are entirely weightless. Nothing has a tangibility to it. It all feels like digital assets.
Despite all this, “Argylle” will find its audience. It’ll find fans in the sub-genre of low effort self-aware action comedies that look like the fake movies characters talk about seeing in real movies. Think “Bullet Train” and “Free Guy.” Matthew Vaughn’s latest will find fans in the “Reddit movie” canon of snarky Deadpool-style riffs on popular culture. It’ll find fans in the “coworker movie” collection of light popcorn entertainment that your one coworker who doesn’t really watch movies won’t stop talking about. But it didn’t find a fan in me. Not when it served as a shallow spoof of spy movie tropes, and certainly not when it became so lost in its parody that it attempted to be an actual spy movie. “The greater the spy, the bigger the lie,” right? Well, let me save you the trouble. There’s no lie worth investing two and a half hours in “Argylle” for.