Time: 139 Minutes
Age Rating: M – Violence & offensive language
Cast:
Henry Cavill as Agent Argylle
Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly Conway
Sam Rockwell as Aidan
Bryan Cranston as Ritter
Catherine O’Hara as Ruth Conway
Sofia Boutella as Saba Al-Badr
Dua Lipa as LaGrange
Ariana DeBose as Keira
John Cena as Wyatt
Samuel L. Jackson as Alfred Solomon
Director: Matthew Vaughn

Reclusive author Elly Conway writes best-selling espionage novels about a secret agent named Argylle who’s on a mission to unravel a global spy syndicate. However, when the plots of her books start to mirror the covert actions of a real-life spy organization, the line between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Matthew Vaughn has directed some movies that I’ve really liked, but his latest movie Argylle really didn’t seem that impressive. The trailers for his upcoming spy action comedy were unremarkable, and they looked worse every time they appeared at almost every screening I went to for the past couple of months. Still, I decided to watch the movie, and while I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, it definitely could’ve been better.

As shown in the trailer, the movie isn’t about Henry Cavill as a spy named Argylle, but instead about Bryce Dallas Howard as the author of a series focussing on a fictional spy named Argylle (played by Henry Cavill), who ends up being hunted by spies herself. The premise with her books reflecting real life events was interesting enough and had some potential. For the first half, it was silly but was fun in how ridiculous and self aware it was that I was willing to follow along with it. Eventually, you realize that the movie is very focused on twists, and shoves as many as possible into this plot. There is a big mystery as to who the real agent Argylle is (which the marketing placed heavy emphasis on), and while it was pretty easy to figure out early on, it worked fine enough in the movie. There’s even a couple of other twists which work, mainly in the first half. However the film’s commitment to piling one twist upon several others wears thin very quickly, and the plot becomes very predictable. The movie spends so much of its runtime adding more twists and explaining each of them to the audience for 10 minutes. While I still understood what was happening in the plot, the movie was needlessly convoluted. Unnecessary twists aside, the writing itself really isn’t that good. The opening sequence of the movie is a scene from one of the Argylle books and is unbelievably cheesy, purposely so. However, the rest of the writing actually didn’t turn out to be that much better honestly, especially with the dialogue.

Argylle is a comedy and while not unbearable, most of the jokes were very hit or miss. It is a silly movie, some of the cheesiness could turn people off and some would say that it’s perhaps trying too hard. Perhaps it is, but I didn’t mind the silliness necessarily. The third act does some really bonkers things, and even has a sequence or two which might betray its own logic. However, it was at least going all out on something, so I’m not going to fault it for that. The big problem for me was just how unexciting the movie felt; at around the second act, I noticed that I just wasn’t feeling anything. Vaughn’s movies usually had a good amount of energy in them, but Argylle really lacked that. On a number of occasions, it builds up momentum, before killing it when it introduces yet another plot twist and having to explain it to the audience. At 2 hours and 20 minutes, Argyle is far too long, it easily could’ve been a 2 hour movie and would’ve been all the better for it. There is a very bizarre mid credits scene, and without going into spoilers, I’m really not sure what Matthew Vaughn thinks he’s doing with this. But in all fairness, it’s not as insane as The King’s Man credits scene in which he included a Thanos style scene teasing Adolf Hitler as the next villain.

This movie sports a great and talented cast, so it’s a shame that only 3-4 of the actors really get to stand out here. As the leads, Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell are good, and while they don’t have the best chemistry, they are enjoyable to watch together. Rockwell particularly shines, and might even be the best part of the whole movie. The comedy doesn’t always work, but when it did, it was usually because of him. Bryan Cranston is also solid as the main villain. Almost everyone else were underutilised; either they have a small supporting part like Samuel L. Jackson, or they have 1 or 2 scenes max and don’t leave big impressions like John Cena, Ariana DeBose and Dua Lipa.

From reading the premise, you can tell that Henry Cavill as the titular fictional spy wasn’t going to be the focus of the movie. However, I wasn’t prepared for how little of him was in the movie, especially considering that he’s the top billed actor in the cast. In the first act, we see him play out some scenes from the Argylle books, and beyond that, there are flashes of him whenever Bryce Dallas Howard looks in a mirror, or it randomly swaps Sam Rockwell out with him. Overall, he probably has less than 10 minutes of screentime in the whole movie. It really felt like Cavill either needed to be just a cameo, or he needed to be a more frequent part of the movie, because he felt rather out of place here. Cavill’s performance isn’t that good but it’s really not his fault given how little he’s given to do here.

Matthew Vaughn has made some good movies in the past, but Argylle contains some of his worst work yet. The biggest surprise for me was just how visually unappealing this movie turned out to be; I swear that Vaughn’s past movies looked way better than this. There are some points where you could be forgiven for thinking that you were watching a straight to Netflix movie. It just looks so artificial; it constantly looks like it’s shot on a green screen, even if it isn’t. It really isn’t helped by the frankly ugly looking CGI. The opening action scene with Henry Cavill has absolute cartoonish and synthetic looking visuals, to the point that I initially put that up to it being a stylistic choice to show how removed this fictional scene was from reality. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie’s CGI weren’t all that much better, whether it be the backgrounds, or or the very rubbery looking character models. There are some mildly entertaining action scenes, but they end up feeling like knock offs of Kingsman action, but weirdly lifeless. The third act has a couple of ridiculous sequences but were entertaining, memorable, and stood out in how silly they were, that I came around to liking them.

Argylle is by far Matthew Vaughn’s worst movie, visually unappealing, overly long, and suffering from a messy, lacklustre, and overcooked script. However, it is watchable, even entertaining in parts, and Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell are good. As a spy action comedy, it was fine, but very flawed and failed to live up to its potential and the talent involved.