Argylle review – I’ve had more fun at dental appointments

Matthew Vaughn made his name by supercharging the comic book genre with a bit of the old ultraviolence in his adaptation of Mark Millar’s graphic novel Kick-Ass. It wasn’t his first film, but it arguably launched him into the mainstream. This was in 2010, right at the beginning of the superhero boom, and a rude, lewd R-rated (15 in the UK) action-comedy that aped the blossoming, earnest genre felt quite novel at the time. He tried this schtick again in 2014 with Kingsman, his take on the British spy movie, in which Taron Egerton plays a lovable oik recruited into a super secret spy organisation.

Vaughn appears to have found his groove with the spy stuff. After three Kingsman films, he’s in similar territory with Argylle, centred around shy author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) who lives a reclusive life in Colorado with her cat Alfie (played by Vaughn’s wife Claudia Schiffer’s cat, Chip) and spends all her time dreaming up adventures for the titular superspy (Henry Cavill with an incredibly unflattering haircut) and his partner Wyatt (a poe-faced John Cena). Things take a turn when Elly is accosted on a train by Aidan (Sam Rockwell) who claims to be a huge fan of her work…and in the business of espionage himself.

Aidan informs Elly she’s in grave danger, setting in motion a spy caper across the world as the pair attempt to understand why the events of Elly’s spy series appear to happening in real life. A pastiche of spy fodder such as James Bond, The Avengers and The Man from U.N.C.L.E, there isn’t much here in the way of original thought (The Lost City did the whole ‘neurotic female author gets sucked into the world of her books’ with more charm back in 2022) and the cliche-riddled dialogue feels so dated it’s as if Jason Fuchs’ script was found down the back of a sofa after ten years among the crumbs and lost pocket change.

Speaking of dated – “the final Beatles” song, Now and Then, features heavily in Argylle (perhaps in a synergy move between Apple Films and Apple Music, who’s to say). Now and Then very famously was only released in November 2023, which makes it baffling that Argylle attempts to pass off the song as an established classic. “This used to be our song,” Aidan comments to Elly, reminiscing about their past. Argylle is a contemporary film (Samuel L Jackson spends almost all of his screen time watching a Lakers game on a giant television) which makes this a particularly glaring anachronism that is at best lazy scripting and at worst painful product placement. Maybe it’s both! At any rate, it feels indicative of how slapdash and forced the whole thing is.

Rockwell and Howard, bless their hearts, really try their best with the awful script. Both are charismatic screen presences, even if their characters don’t exactly stretch them ability-wise. At least Howard gets a lot more to do in this film than she ever does in the Jurassic World franchise she’s been shackled to for a decade. Less charming is the charisma vacuum Dua Lipa, who appears heavily in the film’s publicity materials but mercifully only turns up on screen for two short scenes. She’s a great pop star, but no Cher when it comes to line delivery.

There are a few decent action setpieces – notably one where Elly skates around on a load of oil, and another bafflingly set to X-Factor winner Leona Lewis’s cover of Snow Patrol’s Run – but they lack the grim cartoonish edge of Kick-Ass or Kingsman, and by the time you’ve seen your second ‘Ooh they’re not really dead’ fakeout of the film, the stakes start to shrink dramatically. Throw into the mix a bloated runtime, at once overcomplicated and generic plot, and a shockingly cheap-looking aesthetic for a film that supposedly cost $200 million, and there’s not a whole lot to really enjoy here. To Vaughn’s credit, at least Argylle isn’t as gleefully misogynistic as the Kingsman films, but that’s a bit like saying “Well, at least the pigeon shit didn’t get in my mouth” after a pigeon has shat on your face.

Most ominous of all: a mid-credit sequence ties the film into the Kingsman franchise, setting up some sort of horrifying Matthew Vaughn Extended Universe (what timing, just as everyone’s losing patience with Marvel and DC). ‘Argylle: Book One — The Movie — Coming Soon’ a title card reads, which feels like more of a threat than a promise.

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