Movie Reaction: Argylle

Formula: Kingsman: The Secret Service – Stranger Than Fiction

Circa 2015, Matthew Vaughn had a strong case as covertly once of my favorite directors. Not knowing he was the same director for all of them, I really liked Stardust, Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class, and Kingsman: The Secret Service. They weren’t all even the same kind of movie except for his recurring genre subversion. Since he started revisiting the same ideas though, I’ve struggled to enjoy his movies much. Kingsman: The Golden Circle completely turned me off, like all his clever ideas on the spy movie topic were spent in the first Kingsman. Then The King’s Man, despite having a solid twist, felt like rehashing the same idea. Even still, the man pulls casts that I can’t turn down, which made me curious about Argylle. Despite not loving the last two Kingsman movies, my memory of all of them was of them being low aspiring, frenetic, and fun movies that don’t have a significant bar to clear in order to be good although hard to be great.

In that respect, Argylle is fine, I guess. He revisits the stylized spy genre again, this time with the story of a spy novelist (Bryce Dallas Howard) who finds herself in the middle of an actual spy story inspired by the events in her book. A real spy, Aidan (Sam Rockwell) saves her, reminiscent to Knight & Day. Others like Henry Cavill, John Cena, Ariana DeBose, Bryan Cranston, and even Dua Lipa show up along the way. If nothing else, Matthew Vaughn is excellent at gathering A-list talent.

The movie does deliver on the promise of comically over-the top action and a stylized world that simply can’t be real. Everyone is playing big characters. It’s a silly enough movie that it’s hard to get that worked up about it.

This is a hard movie to pull off. On a script level, it relies on establishing a very convoluted premise while still working in twists. It’s buckles under the challenge of it. The twists can be painfully obvious and the lengths the story has to go to get around them really hurt the pace and structure of the movie. It’s hard to get too deep into what I mean without spoiling some of the fun. Bryce Dallas Howard is a great example of the overall issue though. She has to play both a timid author and an action star at different points, and it’s never that clear how much of one or the other the movie needs her to be at many points. The end result is a performance that isn’t really able to work at either level.

Side Rant: I don’t know why this specifically bothered me so much, but for most of Howard’s biggest set pieces, they give her a blonde wig. I really disliked that. I’m not sure if it was the implication that she couldn’t be glamorous with her normal hair or just that it really didn’t look right on her.

Basically, Argylle could’ve been significantly more fun had it not been bogged down with so much plottiness and serving a twist that doesn’t really make it more interesting than revealing it right away. It’s a weird movie where my audience seemed receptive to it as we left the theater (I heard several “I liked that”s or “That was pretty good”s), yet some of the biggest moments – like one that features a cover of a Snow Patrol song – I couldn’t hear a single person laughing.  Watchable, but missing the manic magic that Vaughn captured in Kick-Ass or the first Kingsman movie. It’s a shame too, because much of the cast was perfectly suited for the idea of the movie, and this could’ve been a really fun use of Bryce Dallas Howard in a rare actual leading role.

Oh, and despite all of the marketing, don’t expect Dua Lipa in more than a decent sized cameo role.