How does Matthew Vaughn keep getting away with this? Sure, the first two "Kingsman" films made a lot of money, but the third one tanked. Also, they got more and more indulgent with each subsequent film, until the best thing about the last one was the nutty Rasputin dance video. "Argylle" feels like it's continuing on the same trajectory. Vaughn's latest twisty spy comedy is overlong, badly paced, and wastes the talents of a lot of good actors. There are a couple of Vaughn's usual absurd action sequences in the last act, but they were too little and too late for me.
"Argylle" is built around a series of twists, and in order to discuss some of the plotting, I'm going to spoil the first one. We open on a spy named Argylle (Henry Cavill with an unfortunate haircut) and his trusty partner Wyatt (John Cena) carrying out a secret mission. It's soon revealed that Argylle is a fictional character, the hero of a series of spy books written by Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard). Plagued by several phobias, Elly lives a lonely life working on her books, with only a cat named Alfie and calls to her mother Ruth (Catherine O'Hara) for companionship. Then one day, she meets a man named Aidan (Sam Rockwell) on a train, claiming to be a real spy. Aidan reveals that Elly's books have somehow been predicting real acts of espionage, and she needs to help him stop the evil Division and its director, Ritter (Bryan Cranston).
The script from Jason Fuchs isn't bad and the premise of this meta-parody of a spy actioner is promising. However, it's absolutely smothered in aggressive style and comic book bombast. The visuals are garish, the laugh lines are so telegraphed that they rarely land, and despite the best efforts of Rockwell and Howard, I didn't care about any of the characters. I started out wanting to root for Elly and Aidan. You don't often see a spy movie starring someone who looks like Bryce Dallas Howard - a perfectly normal woman in her forties who isn't stick-thin or hypersexual. And Sam Rockwell seems to be having a lot of fun with the action scenes, and especially the dance sequences. Alas, their characters are so paper thin - and this is by design because of the demands of the plot - it is impossible to get emotionally invested in anything they are doing.
Vaughn has already announced that this is the beginning of a planned "Argylle" trilogy and connected to the "Kingsman" universe. I'm mentioning this to emphasize how Vaughn is treating "Argylle" like a blockbuster franchise from the get-go. The movie is stuffed with big names, including veterans from the "Kingsman" trilogy like Samuel L. Jackson and Sofia Boutella. Dua Lipa appears in the opening action sequence. Matthew Vaughn's cat plays Alfie. The budget put up by Apple was apparently in the $200 million range. Frankly, the details of the production are far more interesting than the film itself, which is pretty much repeating all of Vaughn's best tricks and worst habits from "Kingsman." I found the overuse of CGI especially grating this time out, because many of the action scenes are so weightless and unconvincing that they might as well be animated.
Parts of the film did work for me, and I don't want to write it off completely. Once we get through the endless rigamarole with the twists, the climaxes in the third act pay off just fine. The action might be terrible, but it is occasionally very funny, which I appreciate. I'm curious about what "Argylle" might have looked like if you only gave Vaughn half the budget and lopped forty minutes off the running time.
Henry Cavill fans beware - he's really not in this movie much. He might have more of a role in the sequels if they get made. And considering that "Argylle" somehow got made, I can't rule that possibility out entirely.
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