Kimber Myers
Matthew Vaughn definitely has a brand. With the Kingsman franchise and Kick Ass, the British director mostly makes movies that thumb their nose at authority, decency, and restraint. These are loud, over-the-top films with style and bravado. They may not be everyone’s cup of tea (especially with diminishing returns for the Kingsman series), but it’s tough to argue that they’re a weak brew. So even with all of the twists in Argylle, the spy action movie’s biggest surprise may be how utterly bland it is.
It isn’t just that Vaughn has made his first PG-13 film in over a decade, though Argylle does feel oddly defanged (or declawed, if you will, given that a cat gets more screen time than most of the famous actors on the poster). There’s just a single use of the f-word (non-sexual, of course), rather than the gleefully foul-mouthed dialogue in Vaughn’s adaptations of Mark Millar’s comics. Argylle’s script from Jason Fuchs (Pan) features so, so many deaths, but the violence is bloodless and boring. It all feels like Vaughn is pulling his punches as much as the characters on screen.
Yet Argylle’s larger sin isn’t its neutered content. The Kingsman films have a growing number of detractors with each release, but they at least feel like they were made by a person. That person was probably an asshole, but at least they were an asshole with a point of view and a knack for worldbuilding (or building out Millar’s world on screen). Those movies were smug but full of verve in both dialogue and visuals, and this is just … there. For almost two-and-a-half hours.
That running time accommodates a lot of plot, too much of it needlessly convoluted and silly. Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a prolific, popular writer of espionage thrillers that center on Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill). Her books aren’t just loved by the masses; they’re pored over by actual spies who see her plots predicting real-world events. Soon, she’s drawn into a plot herself, as henchmen and black-clad agents try to kill her for what she may know. The only person she (maybe?) can trust is scruffy agent Aidan (Sam Rockwell), who looks nothing like the dashing fictional spy she created.
Rockwell’s anarchic charm drives the film, adding a manic energy that propels a too-long, overly twisty story to its conclusion. Howard is fun too, as the mousy homebody author who is overwhelmed by all the murder and duplicity in the world she’s been thrown into. Cavill again is cast as the suave spy after previously playing one in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, but this time with worse hair. His secret agent man is intended to be a model-like hunk, but he sports a goofy flat-top haircut, transforming one of Hollywood’s most-attractive actors into a joke. I love it when hot dudes look dumb, but there’s no indication that that is what Vaughn was going for with this character.
But I digress: there are other things to be mad about in this movie (and in the world as a whole) than just Cavill’s ludicrous coif. Like “Now and Then,” the new (awful) song by … The Beatles that Vaughn plays multiple times. Or the onslaught of jokes that are lucky to get a chuckle. Or wasting a host of talented actors—John Cena, Samuel L. Jackson, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, Ariana DeBose, Sofia Boutella, Rob Delaney—in small roles or parts that don’t showcase what they can do.
Also, the effects look like shit. At first, the sub-par CGI feels like part of the conceit. Our first big action scene is set in Elly’s book, and it’s easy to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. She’s writing a cheesy spy novel; maybe it’s supposed to look like this? But as the film progresses and we’re in what is meant to pass for the real world (that bears no resemblance to reality), the effects are cheap and unconvincing.
Yet the biggest issue is that Argylle’s various elements have all been done better before, even by Vaughn himself. The Kingsman movies (or at least the first one) were more entertaining takes on the world of espionage. The Lost City and, of course, Romancing the Stone both did the story of a hapless writer caught up in a real adventure in a far more fun way. This is theoretically an original story (wild marketing schemes and conspiratorial nonsense aside), but so little of it feels fresh.
Argylle does have its moments; coasting on the charms of Rockwell and Howard and a few solid sequences gets it far more mileage than it probably deserves. For all its problems, this should be a worse movie, but various elements buoy it from being an absolute drag. Rockwell is a wild card, an ace up the film’s sleeve, but he isn’t enough to eke out a winning hand for Argylle.
D+
“Argylle” is in theaters today.
