‘Argylle’ review: Another Matthew Vaughn spy movie wipeout
Argyle is a pretty pattern. “Argylle,” meanwhile, is the latest example of a pretty irritating pattern from director Matthew Vaughn.
Somehow the man with one plan has been allowed to churn out yet another obnoxious spy spoof movie, this time by the geniuses at Apple.
That the tech giant hired Vaughn is understandable.
His fantastic “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” starring Taron Egerton, is one of the best action-comedy films of the past decade, even if its respective sequel and prequel, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” and “The King’s Man,” were both awful.
ARGYLLE
Running time: 139 minutes. Rated PG-13 (strong violence and action and some strong language). In theaters Feb. 2.
I’m sure Apple figured that starting over with an all-new blockbuster franchise could rekindle Vaughn’s once-roaring creative flame.
iWish.
Instead, “Argylle” is an assembling of the director’s worst espionage genre habits: overabundant wackiness, casting a long list of do-nothing stars whose greatest contributions are to the movie poster, and tossing in more twists than an Auntie Anne’s pretzel shop.
“Argylle” is about a hugely successful spy novelist named Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard, essentially running from dinosaurs for 2 1/2 hours) who gets sucked into an actual secret agent’s mission when she meets undercover Aidan (Sam Rockwell) on a train.
Although Elly is rich and famous, she behaves like Bridget Jones. The single woman lives alone, carries around her cat in one of those lame fishbowl backpacks and her favorite song of all time is The Beatles’ “Now and Then” — remarkable, seeing as that lost single was released only three months ago.
By Apple.
From the get-go, the story is been-there-done-that. Buttoned-up women authors have found adventure before in Robert Zemeckis’ far more delightful “Romancing the Stone” and the Sandra Bullock 2022 vehicle “The Lost City.”
There’s nothing new here — or fun.
A villainous organization called the Division, led by Bryan Cranston’s Ritter, is on the hunt for Elly because her four books about debonair Aubrey Argylle (Henry Cavill, with a weird boxy haircut, plays the literary creation in her mind) have accidentally revealed all of their nefarious plans. They believe she knows the location of a consequential “masterkey.”
The other spies in her imagination are played by John Cena and Ariana DeBose, but we don’t see much of them. Like I said, names on the poster.
Although the setup is well-worn, a decent movie could have been born out of the stark contrast between the glamorous 007 image in her novels and the down-and-dirty reality of crime solving.
Vaughn did exactly that in “Kingsman” with underprivileged, street-smart Eggsy and the suave, technologically advanced Kingsman group.
But the world of Rockwell’s Aidan and former CIA director Alfred Solomon (Samuel L. Jackson) is even crazier than the later Roger Moore-James Bond films.
When a major reveal arrived about Elly’s past, my eyes rolled out of the theater, down two escalators and onto Broadway, where they were run over by an ebike.
During one perplexing action sequence, Elly goes ice-skating on an oil slick using skates she MacGyvered by attaching knives to her shoes.
Prior to that, Elly and Aidan engage in a lovers’ dance-fight set to the Leona Lewis song “Run,” along with a rainbow of multicolored smoke bombs.
Somehow more ridiculous than all of that is the dialogue in Jason Fuchs’ script, which is always accompanied by Lorne Balfe’s cliched musical score that never pipes down.
“There’s a reason I write about spies, not romance, Mother,” Elly tells her mom, who’s played by a wasted Catherine O’Hara. “It’s less complicated.”
Ninety minutes later, actress Sofia Boutella utters roughly the same line.
“There’s a reason I’m known as the Keeper of Secrets,” she tells Aidan. “It’s because I keep them.”
And, so, to conclude with the utmost originality: There’s a reason you shouldn’t see “Argylle,” readers. It’s because it’s lousy.
