I find that going into movies knowing as little as possible is always an advantage, though it can be difficult when something has a big budget and has been relentlessly advertised. Fortunately and perhaps miraculously, all I knew of Argylle before sitting down to watch was the tagline from the billboards I’ve seen plastered all over Los Angeles:
“The greater the spy, the bigger the lie.”
With those expectations, I imagined excess and entertainment, which this film sort of delivers…
The action opens on the comedically-coifed Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill), whose cover is almost immediately blown as he tries to get to Lagrange (Dua Lipa), who his partner Wyatt (John Cena) manages to snatch with his bare hands as she’s making a getaway on a bike. It turns out that these larger-than-life spies are in fact the constructs of the imagination of one Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a successful author. As she works on her fifth book, she learns that she may be far too good at what she does, since a real-life rogue spy agency believes that her writing is accurate enough to predict actual events.
Cavill, Dua Lipa, and Cena
Argylle comes from director Matthew Vaughn, best known for the Kingsman films. It’s been twenty full years since his fantastic directorial debut, Layer Cake, which basically set the stage for Daniel Craig to become James Bond, and an emphasis on coherent plot has been gradually abandoned for Vaughn over that time. Absurd action scenes don’t need to make sense since they might still be entertaining, and there’s much of that on display in Argylle as increasingly convoluted storylines lose sight of where they started. Screenwriter Jason Fuchs’ previous credits include Wonder Woman and I Still See You, also films where the writing is not the make-or-break element.
Argylle is many things at once, and very often, it doesn’t feel like it knows what it wants to be. Conway first realizes that the world she’s writing about may not be entirely fabricated when she meets Aidan (Sam Rockwell) onboard a train to go see her parents, and he’s about the silliest spy possible, always joking and not nearly as suave as Argylle, who Conway continues to see when she squints while watching the far less presentable Aidan. Much of the antics that ensues are entirely ridiculous, yet that’s the ride that this film wants to take its audiences on, complete with a few highly predictable twists and a few potentially more surprising ones.
Howard and Rockwell
The cast is stacked with talent, though some, like Dua Lipa, who appears in just the film’s opening scene, get unduly high billing. Howard is a fun choice for the lead role, able to convey Conway’s lighthearted sensibilities that slowly get hardened over the course of being exposed to an unanticipated merging of her real and invented lives. Rockwell isn’t trying too hard but is typically entertaining, and Bryan Cranston is enjoying his era of mustache-twirling villains where he can dial up the volume of his scorched-earth bad guy as much as he wants. Cavill is clearly having fun too, and his role demands mostly the ability to look cool and effortless while pulling off death-defying, if hardly believable, stunts.
Digging too deeply into the plot of this film won’t lead anywhere good, and its potential success surely means endless sequels from the clearly bankable Vaughn. Each new development invites multiple logic questions, and it’s best to go into this film expecting nothing to be all that coherent and prepared instead for an absurd ride filled with paper-thin twists and consistency. Given the talent involved, this film could have been slightly more well-conceived, and if the first chapter is full of holes and logic gaps, there isn’t much hope for subsequent entries. But it’s only the start of the year, when new releases are never supposed to be terrific. If this is what we’re in for in 2024, there’s likely still some fun to be had. C+
An only literally mustache-free Cranston
Argylle will be released in theaters nationwide on Friday, February 2nd. Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.