The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+
I’m still not sure if Argylle is overly ambitious or just stupid. I was looking forward to this movie based on the trailers and the pedigree of director Matthew Vaughn (who brought us the Kingsman movies, Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class), but Vaughn’s style and comedic sensibilities can’t overcome the film’s bloated, derivative script and the final product feels more like a condensed version of three seasons of a streaming show than it does a movie.
Bryce Dallas Howard stars as Elly Conway, a writer of romantic spy novels centered around a character called Agent Argylle. Conway is approached by a real-life spy (played by Sam Rockwell) who tells her that her novels have been a bit too close to real-life spy shenanigans and that a secret villain organization (led by Bryan Cranston) is after her. Similarly, the good guys want Elly to write new chapters for them to give them a step ahead on the villains.
That’s only the first 20 minutes or so of this 2 hour and 20 minute movie and to describe it any further would require spoilers. The initial setup is very similar to the Sandra Bullock movie The Lost City, which itself is a variation on Romancing the Stone, so the oddly specific idea of a female writer of romantic adventure novels suddenly finding herself wrapped up in a romantic adventure isn’t exactly new. Similarly, the sequences of Elly picturing her writing coming to life are also lifted from those earlier movies (as well as Jewel of the Nile, the sequel to Romancing the Stone). Seemingly aware of this lack of originality, the film overcompensates by introducing an absurd amount of plot twists that start to feel like self-parody by around the 2-hour mark. By the time a triple-agent became a quadruple-agent (or whatever), I had checked out as the film became so convoluted that I don’t know if I could accurately spoil it if I wanted to.
The fantasy sequences, in which the author envisions the characters from her books, make little sense in context and serve only as an excuse for Henry Cavill, John Cena and Dua Lipa to have extended cameos. If you’ve seen the trailer, then you’ve seen 90% of their screen time in the movie. However, while similar sequences in Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile clearly serve as introductions to the world of the author’s work, they are spliced throughout Argylle without much rhyme or reason and made me question the main character’s sanity as daydreams started to drift into full-blown psychosis. These scenes add nothing but some big names for the trailer and extra minutes to an already unmanageable running time.
Argylle was produced by Apple and, if I may coin a term, it looks streaming-cheap. This occurs when something is incredibly expensive, but somehow still looks like cheap trash made to be dumped on a platform that measures success by minutes-viewed. It reminds me of how you could instantly identify a made-for-video movie back in the day; you couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but something about it just looked off. Argylle cost $200 million for some reason and it has some of the most ghastly effects in recent memory. This movie has a computer-generated cat. Not a lion, not a panther, just a regular house cat. It’s on par with that ridiculous looking jaguar in the Jungle Cruise movie, but at least that was a jaguar. Do animal trainers not exist anymore or have we just become this lazy as a society? Multiple action sequences are done amid distractingly-terrible CGI effects, most notably a shootout in multi-colored clouds of smoke where it couldn’t be more apparent that no actual smoke was used. It’s astonishing that something so expensive could have effects that would have looked terrible 30 years ago.
The toned-down, PG-13 violence doesn’t help matters either. While the Kingsman movies blended a humorous tone with over-the-top bloodshed, creating something akin to a live-action adult cartoon, Argylle is a much safer affair, creating something akin to a really lame children’s cartoon that thinks too much of itself. There is violence, sure, but nobody ever really seems to get hurt. People get shot and just fall down, as if shot by an imaginary gun in a schoolyard. Nobody bleeds. People get the living hell kicked out of them, but there is no visceral impact to anything. Imagine watching the church massacre sequence in the first Kingsman edited down for an airing on Nickelodeon and you get something like Argylle.
The star-studded cast saves the film from being completely irredeemable. With the bloated script and litany of characters, I hadn’t even mentioned that Samuel L. Jackson and Catherine O’Hara are in this. Ariana DeBose is also here for basically a cameo and, as I mentioned in my review of I.S.S., she’s apparently one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time Magazine. Nobody is sleep walking through this, it’s just that most of them have very little to do. In Henry Cavill’s case, he is basically there to literally wink at the camera every so often. That being said, Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell are great as the leads and bring some much-needed entertainment value to this mess. These are genuinely fun characters and I would like to see them in a different adventure, so it’s a shame to see their likability and chemistry wasted here.
If Argylle was 90 minutes long, I could say that it is a passable watch. But at 2 hours and 20 minutes, the movie goes 50 minutes and about 10 plot twists too far. The effects are shockingly bad, the action is watered down and the great cast is wasted on a script that doesn’t know when to shut up. And that goddamn CGI cat will haunt me for the foreseeable future.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argylle#/media/File:Argylle_poster.jpg
