Is It Over Now?
For the last few months, there has been much online speculation regarding the identity of the author of the unpublished book that Argylle is supposedly based on. Although there was some thought at first that it might be J.K. Rowling (which might explain the apparent reluctance to identify the writer), many people came the conclusion that it could well be the brainchild of none other than Taylor Swift, based on such apparent clues as star Bryce Dallas Howard playing a red-haired, cardigan-clad author as Swift did in her All Too Well video and her character’s ownership of a Scottish Fold cat, the same breed as the two cats that Swift famously owns. Like most internet theories, this speculation more than a little silly and would eventually be debunked by those actually involved with the production, including Howard and director Matthew Vaughn, but I suspect that there will still be more than a few people who will run out to see it on its opening weekend in the belief that Swift had something to do with it after all.
Having now actually seen Argylle, I can assure you, both as a film critic and as an admitted Swiftie, that the singer almost certainly had nothing to do with its creation, largely because there is absolutely nothing in her considerable artistic output to date to suggest that she, or most any other reasonably sentient life form, could have come up with something as staggeringly annoying and puerile as this crushingly idiotic bore. The last couple of years have seen an influx of slick, smug star-studded action comedy craptaculars produced by streaming services with too much money and too little common sense in a desperate attempt to attract eyeballs but as bad as the bloated likes of The Gray Man, Red Notice and Ghosted have been, even they seem to pale in comparison to this monstrously over scaled and sadly underthought waste of time, talent and a budget reportedly upward of $200 million dollars. Hell, even people who actually liked those aforementioned titles may find it nearly impossible to make it through the 140 minute of sensorial bludgeoning that passes—in the kidney stone sense of the word—for entertainment here.
Howard plays Elly Conway, a best-selling author of spy novels centering around the globe-trotting adventures of a super-slick spy known as Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) and the opening sequence finds Argylle getting involved in yet another wild escapade, this one in Greece featuring Dua Lipa as a femme fatale, John Cena and Ariana DeBose as backup and lots of cartoonish action set to the sounds of Barry White until we discover that what we are seeing is the final chapter of Elly’s fourth book that she is reading to a group of fans. As it turns out, the industrious Elly has already all but completed the fifth book, in which Argylle discovers the existence of a top secret collection of rogue agents known as The Division who are bent on something or other and is about to head to London to meet with a hacker who will help him get the proof that he needs to expose them all. However, when she sends the manuscript to her mother (Catherine O’Hara) to read, she objects to the cliffhanger ending and convinces her to write one more chapter that will bring the story to a proper conclusion.
Sticking her beloved pet cat Alfie in a travel backpack, Elly gets on a train—she is afraid of flying, among many other things—to see her mom to hash out a new finale, only to discover that virtually everyone else on board seems hellbent on killing her. The exception is Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a guy who looks like a particularly shaggy beach bum but who claims to be a spy himself and dispatches the others so handily before parachuting him, Elly and Alfie off the train that when Elly watches him work, he is sometimes replaced in her mind by Argylle himself. After landing, Aidan explains to the incredulous Elly that the scenarios that she has ostensibly been dreaming up for her narratives are actually real and the leader of the actual Division (Bryan Cranston) wants to use her gifts in order to help uncover that apparently real hacker before they can expose their crimes to the world.
In theory, Argylle intends to serve as a spoof of over-the-top spy entertainments like the James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises that uses its meta-narrative conceit as a way to cleverly have fun with the often-ludicrous tropes found in them. Unfortunately, the film is never close to being as clever as it clearly thinks itself to be for a number of key reasons. For starters, the Bond and M;I films have generally told their stories with tongue planted firmly in cheek that shows that they are fully aware of the goofiness of their conventions. By constantly joking about things that are already very clearly meant to be jokes, the screenplay by Jason Fuchs demonstrates all the wit and creativity of some MST3k-wannabe lamely spouting off hacky comments until he is either removed from the theater or gets a drink dumped on him by another audience member. It makes sense, I suppose, that the opening sequence has the look and feel of one of the more cartoony Bond epics but since the whole movie is like that—to the point where it makes Moonraker seem like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by comparison—the kitschiness quickly curdles and becomes increasingly hard to endure as it goes on and on and on.
Even based completely on its own merits, the screenplay for Argylle comes up short. Although it clearly wants us to believe that it is being daringly creative throughout, the whole thing feels like an amalgam of bits and pieces wrenched from such better films as Romancing the Stone (a timid authoress finds herself smack in the middle of an adventure straight out of her pulpiest fictions) and the underrated spy satires Hopscotch and Burn Without Reading (both of which featured pursuits of memoirs that could reveal espionage secrets to the world), to name just a few. This filching of material gets so preposterous that by the end of the film, Vaughn finds himself in the awkward position of ripping off his own Kingsman: The Secret Service when a character lashes a couple of knife blades to their feet in order to get out of a predicament. Almost as frustrating is the way that the script attempts to pull the rug out from under the feet of viewers every few minutes with some startling new twist—not only does this eventually cause you to become further detached from the proceedings (why develop any involvement in what is going on if everything is going to be changed up in the next reel?), but the twists themselves soon begin to strain the already nebulous sense of plausibility and coherence on display.
Even if you are content to regard Argylle simply on the level of a wild bit of spectacle, this is little more than eye candy in its most indigestible form. Vaughn goes from setpiece to setpiece without ever finding a particularly compelling visual approach—there is no sense of grace or flow to the big action beats and some of the CGI on display (especially in the scene in which Elly and Aiden depart the train via parachute) look so crummy that you’ll find yourself thinking that Apple should do an audit on where all the money budgeted for it actually went. Even stranger, even though Vaughn has gleefully went the hard-R route in the past with Kick-Ass and the Kingsmen film, he has inexplicably elected to go PG-13 here, a bizarre decision since a.) including sex and violence on a level that the Bond films always hint at without ever quite achieving might have actually helped this one at least seem to have some kind of point and b.) the film is still insanely violent, though by not actually including the gore when hundreds of people are shot and stabbed makes it seem even more gross than if the blood was flowing. There is one action scene that does come close to achieving the kind of crackpot visual grandeur that Vaughn was hoping to achieve—a loopy gun ballet staged in a corridor filled with various layers of colored smoke—but it comes so late in the proceedings that even it cannot quite shake the torpor that the film has long since settled into.
In the end, Argylle offers viewers little more than the not-exactly-inspiring sight of watching a bunch of good actors wasting their considerable talents serving as pawns in the service of Vaughn’s increasingly tedious jerkoff of a film in exchange for what I can only hope were huge paychecks—O’Hara is the only one who occasionally cuts through the clutter to earn some laughs but even her ferocious talent ends up getting overwhelmed by the surrounding claptrap. (As for the pop goddess who actually is involved with the project, Dua Lipa does cut a striking presence as the film’s platonic ideal of the stereotypical Bond Girl type, so of course, the film undercuts one of its few actual assets by limiting her role almost entirely to what is seen in its trailer.) Oh, and just when you think that the combination of incoherence and self-satisfaction cannot possibly get any more irritating, it manages to top itself with a post-credit bit that somehow manages to ramp up the annoyance even further. Perhaps the only thing that might make sitting through it even vaguely palatable is to bring in you phone and earbuds and listen to a playlist of Taylor Swift songs with your eyes closed while it unspools—at least that way, you will be guaranteed some form of actual entertainment.