Argylle
APPLE TV+
The best part of Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle comes in its opening scene, where the titular Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) dances to Barry White’s “You’re The First, The Last, My Everything” with LaGrange (Dua Lipa). Barring Cavill’s ridiculous Duke Nukem haircut, it’s the only moment in Vaughn’s film that feels like a moving picture. White’s song is a classic but gives the scene a much-needed stylistic flourish. Cavill and Lipa’s facial expressions convey deep and complex emotions as they swirl around on the dancefloor through George Richmond’s moving camera. It’s the only time Vaughn directs a scene with some form of feeling in the film because he’s aided by a timeless song that can add so much to a picture’s emotional underpinnings without the actors having to do much on screen.
That momentum gets immediately hampered once Argylle pursues LaGrange in one of the most artificial car chases ever conceived on a silver screen: the terribly unfinished CGI hampers any ounce of movement Vaughn usually creates as a visual filmmaker in films like Layer Cake, X-Men: First Class, and Kingsman: The Secret Service. But in Argylle, he’s in total sleep mode: directing each action setpiece with no kinetic eye. Not even some of the most elaborate camera movements and use of striking colors in its latter half can save them: each setpiece is as deadly dull to watch as the last. Is it in part due to its PG-13 rating? Not really, although cutting away from scenes of extreme violence as its main antagonist, Director Ritter (Bryan Cranston), kills one of his employees with a shotgun doesn’t help when Vaughn’s Kingsman films heavily leaned into its R-rating.
No, the only reason Argylle’s action and the film don’t work is simple: there’s no authorial vision behind the camera. When one watches Kick-Ass, Kingsman, or even his X-Men prequel, one can see where Vaughn’s visual flourishes are, as imperfect as his latter Kingsman movies were. There’s still the mark of an author with each frame he creates and action scenes he puts on film. As dodgy as The Golden Circle is, the “Let’s Go Crazy” cold open still ranks high as one of Vaughn’s greatest feats as a filmmaker, always keeping the camera (and the actors) moving rapidly and exhilaratingly.
Where’s that filmmaker when he’s tapped to make a literal spy dream: a Romancing the Stone-like spoof that packages James Bond (and Mission: Impossible)’s greatest hits inside a spiderweb-like story that keeps itself moving through one crazy twist after another? Someone would think Vaughn would care about making each frame shine and elevate the material with its killer ensemble. A film with a cast this stacked and a massive theatrical release for Apple should at least be fun and engaging, with each actor, whether in a big or small role, having fun being in it.
And yet, there isn’t a single performance that works amidst its stacked cast. Not even Bryce Dallas Howard’s Elly Conway or Sam Rockwell’s Aidan can carry the film from its “real” opening scene to its dreadful finish. Conway is the film’s protagonist, a successful spy novelist whose latest Argylle book has tipped off a shadowy organization named “The Division” because what occurred in the book happened for real. Aidan is now protecting Conway from Director Ritter as they try to uncover who the REAL agent Argylle truly is through the aid of former CIA agent Alfred Solomon (Samuel L. Jackson), who will expose The Division’s corrupt activities once and for all.
The plot is simple enough but keeps overcomplicating itself through a series of twists that appear insane but are, in reality, incredibly predictable. Once all the puzzle pieces are put together, Argylle offers little to no surprises. Everything can be seen a mile away from who Elly’s father is (how come the audience only sees Catherine O’Hara’s Ruth for most of the runtime as they hide her husband? Who could it possibly be?), to dead characters inexplicably coming back to life à la The Young and the Restless, and, finally, the identity of who the REAL agent Argylle is. The latter part was spoiled in 2021 by Apple through its press release that confirmed the start of production (that’s one hell of a mistake when the entire marketing is based on that surprise), but the rest of it is seen a thousand miles away, even if Vaughn tries so hard to make them as unpredictable as possible.
These twists also stretch the runtime to interminable heights, never once justifying its 139-minute runtime. Once the identity of the REAL agent Argylle is revealed, one could think this will propel the movie to the climax, but – HOLY S**T, there’s still…*checks watch* an hour and thirty minutes left in this?????????? That’s right, because the film decides to make a detour in the African Peninsula by introducing another character in Sofia Boutella’s Saba Al-Badr who comes and goes just as John Cena, Ariana DeBose, Dua Lipa, Rob Delaney, and Richard E. Grant do. Sam Jackson seems to have the most fun out of the ensemble, but his character is mostly reduced by watching the Lakers in front of a large screen and clapping his hands as they score while the other actors are here for a brief occasion.
Cavill has a bigger role than the other supporting players in the movie, as he consistently appears through Elly’s mind, cutting from Rockwell’s Aidan to Argylle as she blinks her eyes during action scenes. It could be a neat visual trick if done correctly, but Vaughn’s approach is disorienting and completely dilutes the impact of the action since Rockwell and Cavill do not have the same physicality. Therefore, the effect Vaughn wants to convey isn’t there since the transitions between the two are so jarring they feel like two different action scenes inside the same setting.
And as much as Dallas Howard and Rockwell try to infuse some fun into the proceedings, they can’t overcome the film’s shoddy direction and muddy cinematography. It’s incredibly apparent during its climax, where Vaughn stages two bravura setpieces back to back, one involving Elly and Aidan killing a group of baddies with colored smoke grenades and the other seeing Elly figure skating on crude oil to stab as many people as possible so they can escape The Division. Both scenes could be insanely fun and kinetic, but Vaughn’s direction is so painstakingly minimal and synthetic that they result in the most unimpressive setpieces of his entire career. There isn’t a moment in those scenes that feels excitingly kinetic since the CGI sticks out like a sore thumb, with the performers acting inside a green-screen environment as they figure skate or shoot their way out of the building.
Consider the smoke grenade scene for a bit: it has the potential to be a pure visual feast, as their escape is staged like a choreography (they even draw a heart out of their machine gun bullets). Vaughn is absolutely right in doing so: the best action sequences have a balletic quality, mixing high-quality stuntwork with precise choreographies, as evident in Kingsman’s church scene. Yet, none of the movements work in Argylle because the environment the actors have to work in looks and feels fake. With a budget of $200 million, there’s no excuse for the movie to be a smash regarding its action staging, yet one wonders where the money went because it’s certainly not on the screen.
It seems reductive nowadays to say when a movie is bad, that it has been written and directed by an algorithm. The criticism has been past due after everyone said Apple TV+’s Ghosted was written and directed by ChatGPT. However, with Argylle, everything seems engineered by an algorithm that has been fed spy movies and regurgitates a plot that amalgamates every single trope possible into one overlong blockbuster, never knowing when to stop or when to pull back on its twist to allow its main characters to shine, while also filling the IMAX frame with as many shoddy-looking visual effects and unimpressive action setpieces. It doesn’t help that its score by Lorne Balfe adds so many artificial emotions to the table, with patterns that resemble Hallmark originals' royalty-free music that bludgeon audiences instead of naturally accompanying the story.
As such, Argylle never feels like a real movie, containing no images, setpieces, or performances of note. In reality, the closest thing to compare Argylle with is a money-laundering scheme, where audiences are suckered into watching a riff on James Bond, only for them to come out of the film discombobulated at how little it cares about audience engagement or drawing a proper story. The final nail in the coffin occurs during its mid-credit scene, where Vaughn attempts to tie into the story with a larger Intellectual Property, à la when Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton) inexplicably went, “I’m not sure how I got here. Has to do with Spider-Man, I think.” at the end of Morbius.
This scene, once again, hammers home the idea that the film was written and directed by an algorithm instead of an auteur, who used his voice to craft some of the most interesting blockbusters of the last decade. Perhaps Apple is at fault here, but at least they decided to put it out in cinemas in the hopes it would make a quick buck (it probably will), while Netflix continues to churn out their fake movies on their streaming service, where they will never be remembered. The perennity of the Argylle trailer playing in front of every possible movie that led to a slew of internet memes in anticipation of its release will forever be remembered as one of the moviegoing trends of all time. This happens when a film is put on the big screen, which is something that Netflix can’t grasp. Here’s hoping they’ll join the fun soon and put that Cameron Diaz movie in a cinema, where it belongs, with a trailer as hopefully annoying as the one for Argylle. In retrospect, at least the trailer was fun, and its memes were funny; the film itself is not.