In filmmaking, only three films still get made at a big-budget level; the superhero film, the spy thriller or the action comedy.
Argylle belongs to the latter two genres and is as unwieldy as it sounds.
Director Matthew Vaughn is no stranger to high-octane spy thrillers with comedic elements with the Kingsmen franchise springing to mind, and Argylle is his latest attempt to show audiences he has substance underneath his style.
The film follows Byrce Dallas Howard as a meek novelist who pens the wildly popular Argylle series of books, but reality and fiction start to blend as Howard finds herself caught in the middle of her own globetrotting spy thriller.
Howard has a knack for writing plot points that end up happening in real life, and soon a shadowy cabal sets out to stop her.
Argylle boasts a fantastic cast, with Bryan Cranston trying to bring gravitas to a role that doesn’t deserve it, Catherine O’Hara is the one actor who comes out of this mess intact, Samuel L Jackson is having fun and the film somewhat bafflingly uses Oscar winner Ariana DeBose for all of 3 minutes.
Sam Rockwell ends up being the 2nd lead of the film alongside Howard, and for all of the flaws, there is a novelty to seeing someone with Rockwell’s odd energy lead a major action film.
1993 saw the release of Last Action Hero, widely regarded as the film that ended Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reign as the king of Hollywood, but time has been kinder to that film.
Last Action Hero explores the idea of something jumping from fiction into reality and how the voice of the author is the singular most important voice in any creative endeavour and made those points back in 1993.
Argylle tries to explore the same points in 2024 and it lands with a thud; this film is not deserving of a critical re-evaluation and we are planting that flag right now.
To give Argylle the faintest of praise, it is much better when it stops being a typical Matthew Vaughn film.
Without getting into spoilers, the film takes an interesting swerve that is executed fairly well and displays a level of intelligence that the film otherwise does not possess.
For a solid 30-minute stretch, the film flirts with being good, then the film remembers it’s a dumb Matthew Vaughn film and the audience is sandblasted with quirky, too gauche for its own good flamboyancy.
The film is advertised as Henry Cavill as a James Bond-style action man who saves the day in exotic locales, but the film is decidedly not that.
We are fairly confident that 60% of Cavill’s scenes are in the trailer and filmed them during a lunch break.
Vaughan stated he cast Cavill in the role with the intent of casting him as a James Bond-style figure before the Bond series could, but there is no fear of Cavill being remembered for this film.
The most frustrating thing about Argylle is that it becomes a semi-decent movie when it forgets the main premise and goes off on odd little tangents, but just when the film starts becoming something worthwhile you are dragged under the waves once again.
Matthew Vaughn first came to prominence as Guy Ritchie’s producer in the 90s before striking out on his own with the 2004 film Layer Cake, notable for being the film that landed Daniel Craig the James Bond role.
Layer Cake possesses one stand-out sequence where someone gets the living daylights battered out of them while Ordinary World by Duran Duran plays and was a sign that Vaughn could go on to have the same career as his stable mate.
It can be argued that Vaughn has been coasting off the success of that film since then and has tried in every movie he has made since then to have one big bombastic sequence while a famous song plays.
He is somewhat successful in doing this in the first Kingsmen film with a memorable sequence set in a church, and he proceeds to repeat the same gag three times in Argylle.
By the 3rd flashy and over-directed action sequence, you are left checking your watch.
The current trend of action comedy films owes a lot to the John Wick school of filmmaking where hyper-kinetic and frenetic violence is juxtaposed against a certain restraint and style, but Argylle takes the wrong lessons from what makes those movies work.
Despite costing more than those films, Argylle feels like the AI-generated version.
We care about what happens to John Wick because we have grown to know and love him over the years; trying to expect us to care about characters we just met is naive at best and dumb-headed at worst.
Netflix made the same mistake in 2022 with The Gray Man, another 200 million dollar debacle, and it appears that lessons have not been learned.
For a film that focuses on a writer who can’t figure out what’s going to happen next and is under pressure to write, there is an irony in the film being in dire need of having 20 minutes cut or another round of script revisions.
There are threats of making this a multi-film franchise, but with any justice, this will be a one-and-done affair.
Critics are conditioned to know when a film is coming to an end and when the film is winding down, so hearing a cacophony of fellow critics zipping up their jackets and putting on their rucksacks five minutes before the end of the film is a review in and of itself.
The people who were being paid to be there weren’t interested in the film, so why should our dear readers hand over their hard-earned money?
Save some money this week; call up an old friend you haven’t spoken to in years, start reading that book you’ve been putting off, advance another level in Spanish on Duolingo, grout the tiles in your bathroom, just do literally anything else but see Argylle.