Stick to Socks
Matthew Vaughn thinks ‘Argylle’ will be one of the building blocks of a Kingsman spy-verse. Matthew Vaughn should think again.
ARgylle
Director: Matthew Vaughn • Writer: Jason Fuchs
Starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O'Hara, Henry Cavill, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose, Samuel L Jackson
USA / UK • 2hrs 19mins
Opens Hong Kong February 1 • IIA
Grade: C
When anxiety-plagued, mousy spy novelist Elly Conway (Not Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jurassic World) and her Scottish Fold cat Alfie (which never needs a litter box) get on a train (in the US, hahahahaha) to go visit her mother Ruth (wasted international treasure Catherine O'Hara), it turns out to be the first step into a world of real espionage that Elly didn’t realise she was documenting in her books quite so accurately – and threateningly. But she has a shadowy protector in another spy, Aidan (Oscar winner Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), who helps her out and kicks some ass. Of course, they fall in love. He puts up with the cat. Awwww.
I get what Matthew Vaughn was trying to do in Argylle, I really do. He’s marrying the tropes of the romantic spy thriller to the ones of creative bookworm-finds-excitement movies and blowing them up to mega proportions. The problem is that he doesn’t blow them up from jump, and so when the best parts of Argylle finally show themselves, they come out of left field. Bewilderingly so. Argylle is a mess: it’s all over the map tonally, the CGI is dodgy AF – unless it’s supposed to be in the parts where Howard and Rockwell don’t look airless and plastic? – it’s funny only in fits and starts and has way, way too much Henry Cavill as Elly’s fictional superspy Argylle. There’s almost as much Cavill as there are “surprising” plot reveals and Apple product placements (this is an Apple Original Film after all). Plus, the film insists on turning Howard into Adele (wha?) near the end in a unflattering colour scheme that’s borderline insulting. She deserves better.
Just let Bryce be Bryce
Romancing the Stone and The Lost City loom large, both of which are fun romps, and there’s a fun romp in here somewhere too. You can kind of see where it wants to go but the film is like a toddler that gets distracted by something shiny and loses focus. What works in Argylle works because Howard (ever so slightly miscast) and Rockwell seem to be having a blast, and their dynamic goes a long way to keeping the film watchable. The film starts with a spy op gone wrong when Argylle zeroes in on bad guy Lagrange (singer Dua Lipa, not terrible) with some questionable dance moves. She gets away and he chases her through the winding streets of Santorini until his partner, Wyatt (John Cena), catches her. It’s a heightened, cartoonish bit of adventuring that signals an intentionally goofy time. Great. Fabulous. Perfect place for obvious CGI. That mission turns out to be a sequence from Elly’s latest book she does at a reading – where writer Jason Fuchs drop a massive clue – and the cliffhanger ending from her next involving a Master File stolen from The Directorate (like I said, it’s always The Directorate, or the Division, or The Company or some such) gets the attention of the real, erm, Division boss Ritter (Bryan Cranston, chewing all the scenery but seeming to enjoy it). Off she, Aidan and Alfie go to solve the real world spy mystery.
Since his breakout crime thriller Layer Cake and later Kick-Ass, Vaughn has often proved to be unable to get out of his own way; he’s never going to live down that butt sex joke from Kingsman: The Secret Service and rightly so. To his credit he’s ditched the self-satisfied juvenilia this time around but Argylle piles on twists to the point of exhaustion, then cudgelling (this is where there’s too much Cavill as character device – we get it) and finally indifference. More than a few of these twists paint Vaughn and actor-writer Fuchs (The Passage, Pan) into a narrative corner, and end up losing them whatever cleverness there might have been to the ether of apathy. A possible trilogy (!) Vaughn wants to roll into a larger MCU-style spy universe (!!) along with the Kingsman series and a third trilogy, TBD (!!!) seems like a long shot.
Now, there are little delights buried deep, deep beneath Argylle’s frantic litter box machinations. The final SPOILER reveal that Argylle and Wyatt are a couple is glorious, Cavill’s final scene is hair-do perfection, and the Big Moment where Aidan and Elly colourfully shoot their way out of a Division lair subbasement is gonzo in the best way possible. It’s the film’s bonkers highlight, second only to Elly’s triple lutz (long story). On top of it the stacked cast includes Ariana DeBose, Sofia Boutella and Samuel L Jackson in small parts, so bonus. But Argylle is simply too long and has too many endings to be the smart in-joke it wants to be. And it has far too many uses of that bloody “new” Beatles song “Now and Then” … available on Apple Music! — DEK