Henry Cavill looks suspicious. Anger in the eyes, that smooth voice all wrong for that Grand Canyon body. Back in 2007, Matthew Vaughn shorthanded him as a jerky alpha posh in Stardust. For the director’s new Argylle, Cavill needs to exude sensuality, mystery, efficiency. His titular secret agent twirls a glamour terrorist before car-chasing her over Grecian rooftops. That’s Scene One. Cavill gave suave espionage in 2015’s snazzbox The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and was the most metal thing in any Mission: Impossible. Vaughn discovered one, maybe two James Bonds. So it’s a bummer how the opening setpiece fails four ways. Bad dance, bad action, bad jacket, bad hair. Laughless mirth and limp thrills. The Spectre Who Shagged Me.
Oh no, I thought, a mediocre spy movie. If only. The story mindbends across timelines and hallucinations. My opening paragraph, about Henry Cavill? Fooled you. Argylle is Argylle’s pump-fake. The focus shifts to Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a successful novelist working on her fifth book about a hero named Argylle. She’s the kind of writer who speaks the words she’s typing. Has a cat, swears “I’m not a cat lady!” A bizarre beardo named Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell) accosts her on a train. To prove he’s a genuine spy, Aidan kills the, like, 37 people who suddenly attack. (The PG-13 violence is only medium ultra.)
People hunt Elly because her fiction is fact. The Argylle stories, Aidan says, prophesize actual shadow ops. Now an agency blahfully called the Division wants her unfinished novel. Aidan needs her to find the top-secret master file Argylle was tracking in her books, except for real life. What is the truth? How does Elly keep seeing ghostly flashes of Argylle? Who, where, when, whatever, and, good lord, whywhywhy?
The nonchalant assassin teaching a nervous normy spycraft recalls 2010’s Knight and Day, when Cameron Diaz was the everywoman opposite Tom Cruise’s adventure maniac. The problem there was two megastars circling each other with all the passion of a corporate merger. Here the leads occupy different astral planes. Howard’s single note is always open-eyed gumption – runs in the family – so she gets worse as Argylle barrels her through personal-life drama and on-the-run self-realization. (Her cat is supposed to be hilarious, isn’t.) Rockwell’s handsome-coot chill is ill-suited for Vaughn’s trademark pop-ironic megadeath. Revelations complicate the hatemance. As the Division’s blustery chief, Bryan Cranston stares nefariously at a big information screen. Samuel L. Jackson shows up to watch various things on a huge TV. Elly also FaceTimes her mom, played by Catherine O’Hara. Some movies are boring. This one gives Zoom fatigue.
Those three pros serve shtick. Half the actors on the poster barely appear. John Cena has a good couple minutes. Ariana DeBose does not. Dua Lipa waves hello-goodbye to acting. Jason Fuchs’s twisty script keeps growing new feet to shoot itself in. Certain events seem to play out simultaneously in Argylle’s bookverse and Elly’s reality, which means one lame hacking scene is three lame hacking scenes.
Matthew Vaughn: What happened? Twenty years since his directorial debut, Layer Cake is still the one time his chug-the-bottle-service aesthetic carried any consequence. He caught and challenged the flavor of 2004, matching Daniel Craig’s self-awed yuppie coke dealer against Cockney olds and malignant globo-crime. 2011’s flashy X-Men: First Class backtracked to a retro Fleming fixation. He’s still stuck there: A middle-aged boy with last century’s toys. 2017’s overstuffed Kingsman: The Golden Circle was rock bottom until 2021’s disastrous The King’s Man, which embraced the elitist sneer always lurking under Vaughn’s hard-R hedonism. That prequel imagined the moral chaos of World War I as a Street Fighter showdown between prole Illuminati and an anti-colonial badass pacifist Duke (named freaking Oxford). It’s the first time I ever felt bad for Lenin.
With The King’s Man, Vaughn also mostly ditched his chintz-grenade razzle for a faux-epic sensitivity. Argylle has a separate blandness. When Aidan takes Elly round the world, the mood turns frictionless, flat. Locations look greenscreen. Greenscreens look greenscreen. Only one needle drop is surprising – Leona Lewis doing Snow Patrol for a gun dance – and it soundtracks the umpteenth time a hundred henchmen stand waiting for their headshot.
Vaughn’s name often circled sequel rumors, a Star Wars or a Superman. Knowing nothing, I always figured he was playing a savvy shell game, glomming onto IP buzz while negotiating bigger Kingsman blazer budgets. No regular citizen can name the human who directed two billion-dollar Spider-Mans, so Vaughn bespoking his own franchise was some accomplishment. Likewise, the sheer whirlybird strangeness of Argylle should be impressive even when the train wrecks. But the meta shines a spotlight on the clichés. You can’t quotemark lazy into crazy. When Elly explains an impossible twist, Aidan responds, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” His words, not mine.