Argylle Has a Lot of Problems, Such as Being Terrible and Also Way Too Long

I'm disappointed in you, Taylor Swift. I really thought you'd be the fake source of a much better movie.

When the Einsteins/Brainiacs/Geniuses over at Apple paid two hundred million dollars for Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle they weren’t just buying a shitty movie: they were buying a shitty multi-media experience. 

There wouldn’t be just one movie, of course. This would be a trilogy at the very least. Then there would be graphic novels, coloring books, novelizations, Happy Meal toys, adult novelty items and various other bits of pop culture detritus. 

As part of the media blitzkrieg, it was announced that the film was based on an unpublished novel by an unknown author named Elly Conway. Because the world is a very stupid place, a rumor spread that Taylor Swift, of all people, had written the book under a pseudonym. 

She didn’t, of course, and the publicity and misinformation that resulted did nothing to help the film or its appalling, historically terrible opening box-office results. 

Argylle was gonna be a whole big thing! The Southland Tales-level big. Unfortunately the film does not also have The Southland Tales-level execution.

And I haven’t gotten to the part about Argylle sharing a universe with Kingsman: The Secret Service, another product of the twisted mind of Matthew Vaughn! That’s also a thing that’s happening, or would have happened if this hadn’t flopped.

Hooray?  

The advertising for Argylle, which costs two hundred million dollars and then required eighty million more for marketing, focused on the film’s director and the twisted state of his mind. 

Vaughn had previously made Kick-Ass, a movie with a little girl who had a potty mouth and killed people and was a superhero or something? There’s only one word for something like that: twisted. He also made a movie where, at the end, the female lead was all, “You can put it in my butt.” 

There’s only one adjective appropriate for such a scenario: twisted. 

With Argylle, Vaughn’s twisted mind and sonorous tongue asks and answers the question, “What if something was like James Bond, but different?” 

That’s a provocative, utterly unique premise Vaughn hadn’t explored since the most recent Kingsman movie came out during Christmastime, 2021. That’s over two years ago!

Argylle’s wildly original premise suggests Romancing the Stone if the male lead was a James Bond-style secret agent instead of an Indiana Jones-style adventurer but its third act is borrowed from The Long Kiss Goodnight, which also starred Samuel L. Jackson. 

Romancing the Stone was a big hit when it came out and, along with the Indiana Jones movies, sparked a cottage industry of knockoffs and wannabes about uptight women having adventures with rakish adventurers in exotic locales. 

Romancing the Stone puzzlingly hasn’t endured. There have been no reboots or remakes or television adaptations. It’s seldom spoken about within the context of director Robert Zemeckis’ filmography, to the point where I regularly forget that he even directed it. 

Argylle is consequently a throwback to a breezy earlier style of action comedy that wildly overstays its welcome at a punishing and inhumane ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE MINUTES. 

It’s crazy to me that Vaughn and Apple imagined that audiences would endure nearly two and a half hours of sub-mediocre action-adventure nonsense and be rapacious for more in various forms. 

Bryce Dallas Howard, who has appeared in various successful dinosaur movies whose success she had very little to do with, stars as Elly Conway. She’s a successful spy novelist behind the Argylle series, books about the titular super spy. 

Argylle is played in fantasy sequences by Henry Cavill, who Vaughn mistakenly feels is extremely charismatic and fun when he’s a giant fucking block of wood who has assumed human form. 

Vaughn’s twisted mind seems to think that he’s scored the coup of all coups in having Superman play James Bond but really Cavill is just a handsome actor whose shortcomings in the magnetism department are laid bare here. 

Elly is one of those movie lonely single gals, which means that she’s gorgeous, rich and has a glamorous job yet nevertheless finds herself drinking wine alone except for her beloved cat Alfie. 

The protagonist’s humdrum life as a successful author is shaken up when she meets deadly with Aidan (Sam Rockwell). He’s a secret agent whose fists, feet and mouth are all deadly weapons. 

The wisecracking man of mystery tells a confused and overwhelmed Elly that she has written a series of books that uncannily mirror real-life developments within the international espionage world. 

The good guys and the bad guys alike think that the nervous scribe’s mind, which is twisted but nowhere near as twisted as that of director Matthew Vaughn, contains the answers to questions of profound global significance. 

Physically Rockwell is the antithesis of Cavill. Where Cavill is tall and towering, a big beast of a man, Rockwell is short and compact, a whir of perpetual motion verbally and physically. 

They’re dissimilar as well in the sense that Cavill is unbelievably boring and a goddamn black hole onscreen while Rockwell is a wildly charismatic, funny and engaging performer even when stuck in garbage like this. 

Argylle is a beautiful illustration of Rockwell’s gifts as an actor and a movie star. He’s fast, funny and likable and finds a tone that’s perfect, light and goofy with tongue firmly in cheek. 

Rockwell knows exactly what kind of a movie he’s in (not a good one!) and has fun with it. Unfortunately not even Sam Rockwell can save this monstrosity. He’s agile, quick and fast on his feet while the film is lumbering and leaden. There’s just so goddamn much of it, and very little of it, beyond Rockwell’s performance, is any damn good at all. 

Bryan Cranston, who only seems to devour scenery these days, is a sometimes entertaining, sometimes exhausting ham as the movie’s larger than life villain, the sociopathic leader of an evil secret organization with a surprising relationship with our hero. 

Cranston lustily embraces the role as the closest he’ll ever come to playing a Bond villain. The crucial difference is that this isn’t even sub-par Bond but rather a piss poor imitation. 

John Cena costars as Argylle’s right hand man in the field but he’s barely in a film that seems to last several lifetimes. 

I foolishly wanted to see Argylle so that I could see for myself whether or not I could handle the twisted mind of Matthew Vaughn, or whether seeing his batshit crazy vision onscreen in living color would drive me past the point of sanity and beyond. 

If I had known that Argylle was nearly two and a half hours long I might have chosen anything else instead. Argylle just keeps going and going and going, long after what little inspiration it possesses has run out. 

Just when it seems like the movie should be drawing to a close it introduces a twist in the third act that barely qualifies as a twist and was actually spoiled in a plot description of Argylle I encountered recently. 

Then it feels like the movie subjects us to a whole new bonus film we neither asked for nor want. I was going to give Argylle two stars but it’s nearly an hour too long. 

There’s no reason a featherweight romp like this should take any longer than 90 minutes. Argylle suffers from serious bloat. It’s too much and too little all at the same time although if you enjoy action sequences set to upbeat pop songs then boy does Vaughn have you covered here. 

At the risk of being heretical Argylle isn’t even all that twisted. I’m starting to think that Matthew Vaughn’s mind might not be that twisted after all. 

One and a Half Stars out of Five