Argylle: A Comfortable, Confident Slog

Argylle embodies everything viewers have come to associate with Matthew Vaughn as a director, for better or for worse. While not an auteur of fine art, Vaughn has excelled in crafting film experiences in the past that possess as much heart as they do style. These films are populated with a cast capable of delivering engaging performances. On the surface, Argylle exhibits all these hallmarks and then some, but therein lies the disappointing core of what makes this film so unbearably obnoxious. It amplifies everything we know Matthew Vaughn for to an extreme level, with a script that dials down the project’s earnestness to a mere 4.

As a premise, Argylle does hold a lot of potential for Vaughn’s particular brand of spy silliness, which hinges on how well the characters can keep the audience engaged with a cartoonish number of twists and shocking developments. While twists can be effective, Argylle deploys them at every turn to create excitement within a bland and disappointing plot that follows a predictable pattern. It consistently attempts to present mind-blowing but clearly telegraphed ideas with a half-baked execution.

It’s evident that the film relies more on gimmicks than substance. Vaughn’s trademark action scenes, accompanied by needle drops, are at their most choppy. If the music choices were more inspired, perhaps they would have more spectacle appeal. However, even from a plot perspective, nothing about the action scenes in this film feels tangible or significant. Each scene is marred by unnecessary, rubbery CGI that drains them of any tension that the script’s Looney Tunes logic manages to create.

Its main characters, Elly (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Aiden (Sam Rockwell), aren’t given enough substance to work with. Their arcs are a rollercoaster of twists and turns that leave little room to explore a sense of true humanity in either of them. From a performance standpoint, Howard and Rockwell are comedically engaging beyond belief. Somehow, the two manage to sell trope-ridden and disingenuous dialogue as though it were Shakespeare. If this film were more focused on comedy and less of a weird, over-indulgent hodgepodge of tropes, their characters would have been much more effective.

Despite its narrative shortcomings, Argylle initially impresses with its well-designed set and production design. The film does capture the idea of a normal woman’s world being upended by the absurdity of most spy thrillers that helps initially draw the audience in before losing them completely to a script that flies off the rails before the first act can end. However, it erodes over up, the illusion shattering completely in the finale where the once engaging world space erodes into a plastic-like mess of CGI. An ample allegory for the film as a whole really.

As for the elephant in the room, there’s been a significant lack of talk revolving around Henry Cavill, Dua Lipa, and John Cena in this review even though they are the film’s premiere Hollywood stunt casts. This is because they serve to be nothing more than a visual marketing tactic and barely have anytime in the film but they are used so effectively throughout, the only good twist being their roles in the story. Sam Jackson is also here playing Sam Jackson, which is always a good time.