Argylle (2024)

Score: 1.5 / 5

A bumbling disappointment, Argylle released earlier this year as Matthew Vaughn's latest tongue-in-cheek, action-packed mess of a genre mashup. Shifting slightly in tone from his Kingsman franchise -- though we learn eventually that this is intended to be part of the same mythos -- this film follows a modern author eager to churn out the final installment of her beloved spy book series but suffers writer's block. Seemingly shifting perspective between the fictional world she has created and a real-life (and really life-threatening) espionage campaign around her, the author comes to learn awful truths about herself, her family, her livelihood, and the man she might possibly love. And we're along for the bizarre ride.

Vaughn's style is not for everyone, and even if you choose to get on his wavelength, it's not always a pleasant experience. Feverishly paced and obnoxiously buttressed by cartoonish CGI, his action sequences -- the bread and butter of his directorial efforts -- dazzle with eye-popping excess even as they clearly defy logic. Argylle seems to enjoy the unbelievability of its own action, flagrantly drawing attention to itself during the most incredible moments. Some of this you may have seen in trailers: remember the cat bouncing up off the tarp-wrapped boat to scream into the camera?

As usual, the ensemble cast is delightfully assembled and does its job well, led by Bryce Dallas Howard as author Elly Conway and a particularly excellent Sam Rockwell as Aidan Wilde, a real spy. Henry Cavill pops in occasionally as the imagined title character, though his hideous hair saps him of his usual charm. The fictional characters (including John Cena and Ariana DeBose) play as intentionally flat stock tropes, which works well enough, especially when the editing puts us in Elly's eyeballs and reality and her vision flicker back and forth. Add Catherine O'Hara as Elly's worrisome and somewhat condescending mother -- whose feedback only fuels Elly's block and whose (SPOILER ALERT) Marlene Dietrich-esque turn had me sputtering in joy -- and Bryan Cranston as the sinister head of an undercover agency determined to find and stop Elly from publishing (as her books oddly accurately predict their missions) and the whole thing should have been a lot of fun. But then you remember how many other stars were involved, including Richard E. Grant and Samuel L. Jackson, and the squandered promises come crashing back to the fore.

Aggressively plotted beyond the last inch of its life, the film uses archetypal devices stolen from everything from Mission: Impossible to The Lost City in its efforts to entertain. And it all feels like an exhausting, if not exhaustive, effort indeed. Satire and spoofery are sometimes admirable goals, especially when the state of the art calls for comic reflection and metafictional humor. But spy films are hardly in a place, culturally, to be dissected and repurposed right now, making this enterprise bizarrely forced, artificial in concept as much as in execution. Vaughn's penchant for cheap needle drops is on its most bombastic display here, and while they periodically elicited a guffaw from me, they were rarely appreciated because they weren't earned. Except regarding the obvious high prices paid for certain tunes.

Incomprehensible plotting results in convenient and unlikely twists, revelations, and resolutions that baffled more than enlightened me. And the more flashbacks and expositional monologues piled into the screenplay to make it make more sense, the farther from entertaining the whole thing gets. Its contrivances push it into formulaic romantic beats, draining the leads from their initially interesting characterizations. By the climax, a thoroughly overcooked exercise in banality shot in slow motion with some of the most invasive and unwelcome CGI Skittle-colored smoke I've ever seen, I was ready to abandon the whole thing, and frankly, I wish I had. The crushing disappointment of what could -- and should -- have been a delightfully camp speculation on the future of spy cinema ruined any memory of cutesy gags and funny potentialities that came before.