A Star-Studded Cast Can’t Save This Mission
DIRECTOR: MATTHEW VAUGHN/2024
Argylle reminds me of an ocean liner. Specifically, an ocean liner that misses the port and lands on the beach. The big, unwieldy boat may crash near its destination and everyone may get out alive, but it’s a messy finish no vessel or captain would be proud of.
On paper, Argylle starts with a killer premise, and one not too different from 2022’s The Lost City: Author Elly (Bryce Dallas Howard) writes spy novels coincidentally overlapping with actual espionage, leading real agents to believe she has insider knowledge they need. Unlike The Lost City (which, whatever you thought of it, earned enough box office receipts to place in the annual domestic top 20 and worldwide top 25), Argylle aspires to be a spectacle full of twists. Elly repeats the mantra, “The greater the spy, the greater the lie,” but in the case of this movie, the truism is the greater the ambition, the greater the opportunity for the ship to veer off course.
The real bummer is the first 70% of the movie is serviceable, sometimes even good. Elly is a hit novelist but just an Ordinary Barbie™ outside of her work, one with incredible bangs, a mom for a best friend (Catherine O’Hara), and a cuddly cat named Alfie. Her biggest problem: a bad case of writer’s block, which is preventing her from finishing the fifth novel about her hero Argylle. In her imagination, Argylle (Henry Cavill) and his comrades (John Cena, Ariana DeBose) face off with sexy villains (Dua Lipa) bent on world destruction not too far from Cavill’s experiences in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. But she isn’t equipped when Aidan (Sam Rockwell) sits next to her on a train and insists they’re surrounded by assassins only he can save her from. She only accepts it when the car breaks out into hand-to-hand combat that eerily reminds her of the adventures she’s dreamt up for Argylle.
That sequence on the train is plenty fun, and so are the parallels between Elly’s and Argylle’s missions. If only the plot didn’t squeeze in so much mythology about a secret intelligence organization led by Bryan Cranston, stuffing more and more into the audience’s catpack to remember. A clever idea and a game cast—especially Cavill and Rockwell, who both should be in more non-animated comedies—get weighed down with over-explanations and unnecessary twists on twists that slow the momentum. This is especially odd from the usually zippy director Matthew Vaughn, whose R-rated Kingsman trilogy didn’t hit every note but was always rollicking. (Where is the guy who directed Colin Firth going ham in a church?) Keeping Argylle PG-13 does sand off some of the edginess he’s known for, but the problem here is not that Samuel L. Jackson can’t swear (even if it’s odd not to see the master working in his true medium). The problem is that for a good chunk of this movie Jackson is…just sitting and watching a Lakers game? Did Argylle use its budget too soon to get more scenes with him or does it just have too many characters?
Vaughn attempts to bring his signature larger-than-life style to this spy story, but the budget certainly wasn’t spent on a bad-looking CGI-fest finale, either. In the last two days, I’ve been thinking through all the edits that might make this movie work. Should it have leaned more into the spoof instead of the actual espionage? Should it have swapped out the disco needle drops? Could we have cut that flashback from the problem-laden third act? Maybe if we adjusted the arc of O’Hara’s role or found anything for Oscar winner DeBose to do, it would have softened the landing. Eventually, I realized I’d never fall asleep if I let myself keep thinking about it—nothing could save the fun first hour from the next 80 minutes that beached this ship.