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Feckless Spy Comedy Argylle Loses Itself in its Convolutions


The diminishing returns on the films of Matthew Vaughn are very stark if you can remember a time when he was considered one of the more promising new British action filmmakers. Whether it was Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class or Kingsman: The Secret Service, or my personal favourite -his debut film Layer Cake, there was something fresh to his style and perspective. But the weaknesses of his second Kingsman movie were only exacerbated by a completely dead-on-arrival prequel, and now Argylle has even outdone that one for soullessness. This is a movie that seems to only exist for the digital set-pieces and a few half-baked story beats Vaughn wanted to play with. A spy flick so manufactured, perplexing, and misguided, it is less Austin Powers in Goldmember than it is the opening scene parody from Austin Powers in Goldmember.
Not a good sign when a movie delays as long as possible its main plot, as this one opens on an extended sequence from a spy novel, the fourth in a series, about the eponymous Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) -as hollow and transparent as these archetypes come. The author of these books, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is, outside of her fictional world, quite introverted and lonely; but her life is turned upside down when, the plot of her book resembling too closely the machinations of real international spy organizations, she gets caught up in an elaborate espionage mission with a real secret agent, Aidan (Sam Rockwell).
It should be stated up front that there are aspects of this premise that do have the potential to work. And we know because they largely did in The Lost City, also a movie about an author being dragged into the real kind of adventure that she writes about (if the timelines were a little further apart I would guess that movie directly led to this one). But the idea of an espionage author running into the mission of a secret agent who is not at all like the stereotype has some good potential for humour. It could still play in the action realm, but in the vein of something like Hot Fuzz. And while Vaughn sets up that sort of direction for the film, beyond one and a half action sequences it quickly becomes a conceit left behind. He and the screenwriter Jason Fuchs seem to get bored of it -or else they run out of spy comedy material- about a third of the way in. Hell it only takes them one scene to dispense with the wacky itinerant character Rockwell initially seemed to be playing, and cast him in a more conventional handsome leading man role. Elly’s got this perspective through the first few fight scenes (that gets old and distracting very quickly) where she at intervals imagines Aidan as her Agent Argylle -but the contrast means next to nothing after Aidan stops dressing like a stoner. It’s indicative of a weird lack of self-awareness on the movie’s part, true too of a lot of its humour -not least the most tiresome running gag of the whole movie which seems to be the mere existence of Elly’s cat Alfie -an entirely CG-rendered monstrosity- occasionally peeking out or reacting to things from the safety of Elly’s kitty carrier.
At about the midway point, a ludicrous twist comes up that requires a lot of back-pedalling on pretty much every little detail that the movie had established thus far -and even then, much of the film’s remaining time is devoted over to explaining and re-contextualizing its world. Vaughn intends it to look clever, as he undoes what grounding the movie has and answers for minute details no one but pedants would bring up in an effort to make that everything is connected cleanly. And perhaps it does so, but in a purely clinical way. Most remaining attempts at humour are excised as Argylle endeavours to be a more straightforward, if slightly stylized, spy movie. And to this end it is exactly as hackneyed and contrived as the apparent pastiche that started the film. For a movie that spends a lot of time stressing what is real life, there is no discernible difference between hyper-charged fiction and hyper-charged reality. And neither is the least bit interesting.
Vaughn's formula for action choreography and editing has become almost stale in the decade since Kingsman came out. It's still modestly more interesting than your average action flick, but the sense of spontaneity to it has been completely sapped. If you've even watched one of the Kingsman movies you can more or less predict exactly how a fight scene is going to play here. And moreover, Vaughn has a habit of undermining the energy where it works. The first two of these sequences after the prologue might be fun if not for those frequent Cavill cut-ins. And the several in the climax that are free of these are hurt by their exhausting indulgence of cop-outs and excess CGI (I doubt they left the sound stage for more than one filming day), of 'ironic' needle-drops and of slow-motion -oh so much obnoxious slow-motion! It is a crutch that Vaughn leans on as though this were the early 2000s -and in some cases it’s clearly used as a padding device or as in the climax to ensure that the songs projected over the action can play in their entirety.
Maybe as a distraction from several of these issues, Argylle has an inappropriately enormous celebrity cast. Indeed I think the only reason we see so much of this book series’ world is so the film can cram in the likes of Dua Lipa, John Cena, Ariana DeBose, and Richard E. Grant -in addition to Cavill of course who is front and centre of a lot of the film’s marketing despite being just an imaginary character. As for the leads themselves, Howard and Rockwell are sub-average, though the latter takes to the material slightly better (Howard does not particularly sell her action beats). Samuel L. Jackson and Sofia Boutella show up in generic roles, likely as favours to Vaughn. Catherine O’Hara gets to do some weird things, but isn’t utilized enough, and Bryan Cranston fits well as the villain -the only halfway engaging performance- but it’s a rather bland villain for a spy comedy without much the fun a movie like this desperately needs.
Of course Vaughn has franchise ambitions for Argylle, in spite of how he could barely sustain the premise for this one movie. And even overlooking how fundamentally flimsy the plotting and structure is, it doesn't have any aesthetic other than a watered-down version of Kingsman without the 'British gentlemen' gimmick. With its condescending imitations of creative style and gross abundance of celebrities, it is as safe and calculated an original movie as this Hollywood landscape is capable of producing. And Vaughn, once a wrench in that system, is now wholeheartedly a cog in it.

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