Asher Luberto
There’s style over substance, and then there’s Argylle. A film that makes Michael Bay look restrained, Argylle is a rowdy, ridiculously over-the-top joy ride that only exists to look cool. In other words, it’s a film from Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, Kingsman: The Secret Service).
The director’s latest has enough bullets to stock a gun store and enough fireworks to supply a Fourth of July extravaganza, not to mention enough stars to fill an Oscar party. The cast includes Henry Cavill as a secret agent, Dua Lipa as a Bond girl, Bryce Dallas Howard as a novelist, John Cena as a wingman, Sam Rockwell as a hitman, Samuel L. Jackson as a cool man and Bryan Cranston as a mustache twirling villain. And the action takes place in a number of breezy locales, from glamorous disco halls to glitzy mansions to glorious beaches that will have audiences planning their next vacations. There’s so much on screen you aren’t sure where to look, but sometimes a movie can have too much going on, which is where Vaughn’s latest comes up short.
We’ve all seen movies that feel like multiple movies in one. Argylle is even worse. It feels like an entire season of television crammed into two hours of screen time. When we first meet Argylle (Cavill), he’s on the dance floor with a woman (Lipa) in a sparkling gold dress, her eyes fixated on his flat-top hair. The two get down to some funky music, but she has undercover agents with her, leading to a shootout that builds to a car chase through a coastal village. In a stunning conclusion, Argylle’s wingman (Cena) snatches the suspect off her motorcycle as if catching a frisbee. It’s an incredibly thrilling moment, but then Vaughn drains all momentum from his screenplay.
He cuts to Elly Conway (Howard), author of the popular “Argylle” series, as she types the story we were just watching on screen. She isn’t sure how she wants to end her latest novel, so she decides to take some time off and hops on a train, where she meets a real life spy. On board, Aiden (Rockwell) tells her of a shady organization not unlike the one she writes about, which is the first of many meta ideas on display. Reality and fiction begin to collide for Elly, often within the same scene, as she gets swept up in a conspiracy that’s based on her adrenaline-fueled novels.
Vaughn keeps the action coming at a frenetic pace, too, tossing various obstacles at his muscular stars. The main appeal of Argylle is seeing these stars take on numerous villains, and like clockwork, we get to see Cavill and Rockwell take on hundreds of extras all at once. All the while, catchy music blares from the speakers, bullets fly in slow-motion, bodies pile up like firewood and one liners fly like ammo. Anyone who has seen Vaughn’s Kingsman franchise knows what to expect, but something is missing from his latest spy caper–something along the lines of coherence.
The vivid color palette and the light vibe is a nice change of pace from the dreary blockbusters of late. We’re not sure why action movies have been covered in a haze of self seriousness, as if the genre wasn’t made to give audience’s a fun escape from their daily lives. But the meta tone and layered script wears thin fast, and eventually, you can’t keep up with all the plot twists being thrown your way. As the story unfolds–both the novel being written by Elly and the character’s real life romp–it becomes increasingly hard to follow Argylle, a spy pastiche that lacks any sort of substance.
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