‘Argylle’ Has a Big Secret: It’s a Stunningly Bad Movie
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There are few movie-marketing gimmicks more enticing than the suggestion of a secret — a twist or revelation so shocking, so earth-shaking that it changes everything you thought you knew about a film, its characters, yadda yadda yadda. The audience’s curiosity is piqued, then they become co-conspirators: Once you know, don’t ruin it for those who don’t. Hitchcock famously used this trick for the meta-trailer for Psycho, then proceeded to deliver not one but two of the most jaw-dropping turnabouts in cinema history. Others have relied on the idea the way a wounded person relies on a crutch. It’s Ballyhoo 101.
If you caught the trailer for Argylle, the new thriller-comedy from the Kingsman franchise director Matthew Vaughn, then you’ve been tipped off that some sort of game-changing plot surprise is just a ticket away. Don’t let the cat out of the bag, it begged; the fact that a feline plays a big part in the storyline made the request that much more nudgey-winky. Because this is 2024, people begin guessing en masse as to what — or who — the big reveal is. A few major conspiracy theories in particular came from a fanbase with a reputation for being… more than a little intense. A real-world tie-in to the movie only fueled the notion that someone extremely famous was behind all of this. Vaughn has gamely denied all of it. But to paraphrase Elly Conway, the writer of espionage novels (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) who’s suddenly embroiled in IRL intelligence-agency grudge matches: If it were true, wouldn’t that be exactly what you would say to keep the surprise?
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Knowing what lies inside the soon-to-be-hatched Easter Eggs, we can say that yes, there is indeed a secret at the center of this rehash of other movies involving spy-vs.-spy shenanigans, international intrigue, and triple-crosses. Whether you find it shocking or shockingly predictable is totally subjective. Ditto the lack of concrete confirmations regarding certain aspects of the movie’s alleged origin story. What we can tell you is that there’s another, even more profound revelation long before that “gotcha!” exposition gets dropped. You start to suspect it before you’ve even transitioned out of the first act, and it’s more or less confirmed by the time the big whoa moment shows up. The spoiler is: Argylle is a bad movie. A very, very bad movie.
Maybe that’s not much of a secret. Vaughn has been goofing around with the action-comedy genre for a while, cutting his teeth as a producer for Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch) before directing his own odds-and-sods crime flick Layer Cake in 2004. He’s logged in some fantasy adaptations (Stardust) and for-hire superhero-movie gigs (Kick Ass, the impressively ring-a-ding X-Men: First Class). But Vaughn is probably best-known now for overseeing the Kingsman cinematic universe based on the comics he co-created with Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, in which a highly classified unit within the U.K. Secret Service take down megalomaniacal supervillains. The two movies and a prequel are simultaneously stylish and crass, riffing on everything from Bond films to Britpop lad culture to batshit alternative histories. The violence is cartoonish, the comic gags are broad, and the celebrity appearances are legion. The vibe is like someone vomiting Four Loko all over an exquisitely tailored Saville Row suit.
Argylle shares that same sensibility and love of caricatures and firearms, kicking off with a preamble that feels like it might have been lifted from that series. (Whether this movie resides in its own patch of real estate or within a shared Kingsman world will be debated.) An international man of mystery known as Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) has a nightclub rendezvous with a femme fatale named Lagrange (Dua Lipa). They flirt and dance, showing off a move known as “the whirlybird” — think Olympic iceskating routine meets pantomimed oral sex — until Argylle realizes it’s a trap. Luckily, he’s got a tech wiz (Ariana DeBose) and a sidekick (John Cena) watching his back. One high-speed pursuit through the winding streets and over the wrecked rooftops of a seaside Greek town later, the agent corners his prey and realizes he and his team have been compromised.
The whole thing is nothing more than a figment of a spy-lit legend’s imagination. Argylle is the hero of a series of incredibly popular novels penned by Elly Conway; what we’ve just witnessed comes from a chapter in the fourth volume of the series. She’s just finished a draft of Book Five, in fact, though Elly’s mother (Catherine O’Hara) doesn’t think the story is quite there yet. It needs a better ending, she keeps saying. In the mood for a change of scenery, the writer leaves her lakeside cabin in Colorado, sticks her cat Alfie in a backpack, and jumps on a train to go visit her mom in Chicago. A guy named Aidan (Sam Rockwell) takes the seat across from her. This scruffy, chatty gent who looks like Jesus in a bucket hat is not exactly welcome company.
Then a “fan” asks Elly for an autograph. It’s an assassination attempt. Soon, Aidan takes down a whole gaggle of professional killers out for the author’s head. The duo and her cat manage to escape, at which point Elly finds out that those espionage bestsellers she’s been churning out for the last five years? They’re a little too close to being nonfiction. The fact that her latest ends with a cliffhanger involving a file containing damaging insider information has a lot of actual intelligence-agency bigwigs in a tizzy. Everyone, including a corrupt C.I.A. executive (Bryan Cranston), is waiting to see what’s in this eerily prescient writer’s next chapter. Hopefully, it will lead to finding the real file before a lot of bad stuff goes public.
Cue globetrotting, gunplay, some hyped-up fight sequences, dizzying camerawork, even more famous faces (hi there, Samuel L. Jackson, Richard E. Grant, and Sofia Boutella), stilted banter, a numbing sense of déjà vu, and a lot of hot air. The one big twist is followed by a whole lot of smaller twists piled on one after the other, leading you to wonder if Vaughn and screenwriter Jason Fuchs (Pan, Wonder Woman) were purposefully trying to find the breaking point regarding an audience’s tolerance for switcheroos. Congratulations, guys, you’ve found it! As with the Kingsman movies, there are set pieces that coast on sheer adrenaline and start out as genre-tweaking fun, until they very much aren’t. Even an inspired shootout staged like an old-school dance number in billowing plumes of purple and yellow smoke ends up wearing out its welcome.
There’s a deadening feeling you get watching all of this, as if Argylle’s real revelation is: We’ve cracked the code on how to take a handful of your favorite actors and a surefire ha-ha-bang-bang storyline and leech every single thing out that you usually like about these kinds of things. It’s not Rockwell and Howard’s fault that what’s supposed to be a spiky romantic interplay falls flat, or that the Jurassic World star is singlehandedly stuck trying to breath life into a series of D.O.A. encounters with spy-flick archetypes. (If a sequence in which Howard kicks off her heels before a series of action sequences is indeed an inside-joke dig, however, we reluctantly Rudy-clap the callback.)
No matter how many extra a-ha! moments this tired retread keeps throwing at you, the movie still feels like it’s sucking wind right up until the fade-out. At which point a post-credits kicker seems to hint at more adventures to come, a concept which feels less like a promise and more like a threat. You may go into Argylle wondering, per the film’s curiosity-baiting tagline, who is the real Agent Argylle? But you’ll assuredly leave with a different question: Shouldn’t such a colossal waste of talent and precious time be illegal?
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