Argylle

dir: Matthew Vaughn

2024

Who is this movie for?

Sometimes the (imagined) answer can be illuminating, if you can get close to the movie production’s thinking. Mostly, it’s an excuse for baseless speculation and mean-spirited conjecture on the part of jerks just like me.

If I was to be cynical, and cavalier, which is not a state that comes naturally to me, I would guess that this was kinda sorta aimed at a middle-aged, middle-class ‘white’ female audience. The kind “they” imagine reads trashy thriller / romance novels in a bubble bath while drinking large glasses of wine. There might be the glow of candles present as well.

What I’m getting at is that this is an imagined category, not necessarily by creative people, but by the types of people who work in marketing. They imagine that there’s a market of abundant gin-soaked ladies who would want to burst into a cinema after a boozy afternoon in order to watch the same kind of wish-fulfilment action flicks that usually cater to men who watch in between picking up the remnants of chips or twisties that have fallen onto their chests. Maybe the crumbs fell inside their t-shirts even, which makes them even harder to get at.

Life is a struggle. But the imagined middle-aged woman, who, for some reason still really likes Barry White and all disco music in general, doesn’t like violent action flicks where people get shot in the head or have their limbs sliced off – they want the same kind of action (apparently), just without any blood and with lots and lots of colour.

And they want a central protagonist who is also middle-aged, successful, has a cat, writes books, has a lovely house near a lake, and hankers for love.

In her they can pour all their hopes and dreams, and resentments, and aspirations.

Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a successful author of a series of spy novels featuring her main character Argylle (often played by Henry Cavill, with an awful flat top haircut). He wears a signature green velvet asymmetrical suit and does espionage type stuff around the world, saving the day, bedding the love interests (but respectfully and centred around her pleasure, no doubt, ensuring she gets off before anyone else does), and then flying off to new adventures in some other exotic locale.

As the film opens, we see super spy agent Argylle go into a nightclub, and Dua Lipa is there, playing some character, and then they dance for a while, including doing something that keeps coming up throughout the flick called the Whirly Bird, which is the closest the flick ever gets to being sexual, with the implied oral sex aspect, but from a ‘safe’ and rating friendly distance of a foot away?

It’s… kinda idiotic?

Dua Lipa’s character is not confused about Argylle’s identity, and in fact every single person in the club is one of her henchpeople, and everyone tries to kill Argylle, but he’s just too good / big / has ample support from his friends (Ariana DeBose and John Cena), and somehow gets away and captures the baddie and something something…

The reveal ‘then’ is that what we’ve been watching is just stuff that happens in one of Elly’s books. She’s been doing a reading at a book store, which I guess is something people still do, and everyone’s ever so excited about the release of the new book.

She’s always working on the next book, of course. After hearing from her mother (Catherine O’Hara) who’s read the last draft and finds it unsatisfying, Elly hops on a train to go visit her mum.

But of course she brings her CGI cat Archie with her, in one of those special backpacks for pets.

The cat is the least believable digital effect in the whole flick. It’s terrible. And I’m saying this as someone who’s watched the whole fucking thing, and can honestly say this flick is more fantastical / less real looking than everything we saw in the Matrix sequels.

Nothing looks real except for Bryce Dallas Howard. There is a strange emphasis placed on her drinking. I don’t mean like in other flicks where a character is a drunk, or drinks a lot. Elly never drinks to excess or in anything other than polite moderation. I mean there’s a strange emphasis placed on when she drinks and what she drinks. When she’s “working” in front of her computer, she has to have a drink with her, or when she’s talking with her mum.

It’s bizarre. It’s a bizarre detail. I’m amazed she didn’t have a sign on her wall saying “it’s 5 o’clock / time for chardonnay somewhere in the world!” or “Weekend Forecast 100 % chance of White Wine!”

She has low level anxiety about, uh, almost everything, but at least she’s on the train. A man, a handsome man elects to sit down across from her, and she demurs, so a long-haired bearded weirdo (Sam Rockwell) sits down instead.

Within minutes, the scruffy talkative fellow predicts that people will start attacking them, as if bringing to life the action from her books, But In The Real World! And when that transpires, she starts superimposing the image of Argylle (Cavill) onto the scruffy chap, who gives the twenty or so assassins what for, and with style.

So. Regular person lamenting the lack of love in her life, and other forms of “action”, gets dragged into the world of espionage which strangely seems to parallel what she’s written in her books. That’s odd, isn’t it?

Turns out there are espionage-y type people who think her fictional writing must be ‘real’ in that she must know something about the real world of espionage, and so they try to kill her on the train.

At the time, as a sort of surprise, that scene is perfectly fine, by which I mean, okay and adequate. But once you’ve watched the film, and think back to the scene, you could say to yourself “well, that made no fucking sense, given the explanation of what’s going on.”

For a good hour of this flick (this flick is nearly two and a half hours long, which is an insult to human dignity) what I thought the ‘answer’ was involved poor Elly suffering severely from schizophrenia, being profoundly disassociated from her reality, or any reality, and having created an overlay that made her feel safe and happy. New characters keep being introduced, and they seem less real than their ‘fiction within a fiction’ counterparts. And all along, as always, in these kinds of flicks, Elly is the key to everything.

I mean, of course she is. Elly is the key to this flick the way Jason Bourne is the key to the Jason Bourne flicks. He has a special set of skills, Elly somehow has a special set of skills, and they all tie in together with Elly doing something about a thing, and then another thing, which will have a dramatic impact or absolutely no impact on the broader world.

There’s a baddie (Walter White Heisenberg himself Bryan Cranston) and he like kills people just to show he’s irritated, which is pretty terrible from a HR perspective, and there’s some goodie characters other than Elly and Sam Rockwell’s character, including Samuel L. fucking Jackson in a pointless role.

And then there’s endless convolution upon convolution upon convolution. Is it imagined, is it memory, is it implanted memory, is it ‘real’, is Elly trapped in her skull, is Argylle a personality she’s created in order to feel better about herself, or is Argylle a real person, or is Elly the real hero, or is she the villain?

This movie answers with “um, all of the above”.

In an unkind mood, watching this way too long flick will bring frustration, irritation and contempt to the fore (do not operate heavy machinery or drive after watching this flick for at least four hour afterwards). And the big action set pieces towards the end, of which there are two, may do less than delight the audience. I found the ‘colourful one’, awkward as it might have been in parts, overly reliant on digital trickery as it is, at least somewhat ‘works’.

Immediately following that there’s a sequence requiring Elly to kill a bunch of guys while ice skating on oil, on fucking oil, and it’s too stupid for words. My one consolation, and it’s no consolation whatsoever, is that the entire thing is CGI, so no henchmen hurt their backs or anywhere else on their precious bodies in the making of that terribly conceived and realised sequence.

I mean…oil? Why would you be able to ice skate on oil? It’s oil. From here the only way is down, as they then feel compelled to lift from The Winter Soldier, as Elly turns into a programmable Bucky, and by this stage I was almost entirely checked out.

Dallas Howard does as best as she can in the flick, as does Rockwell, who’s generally charming and funny, but the longer it goes on, the less sensible, the less tangibly real any of it seems, to the point where I realised, like I’m realising now, with something of a sinking feeling, that nothing is real and there’s no point to anything.

For whatever reason, the people who’ve made this flick want to link it to the other flicks Matthew Vaughn has made, being the Kingsman series of increasingly dire movies, and… I don’t really have feelings about that, or any profound thoughts. In truth I think it would have been better to link it to a different set of movies Vaughn was involved in, being the Kick-Ass flicks, so that Hit-Girl could come in and kill everyone involved.

But I’m being unfair. It’s funny to me that John Cena was in the early part of this flick, because considering how little the flick seems to respect the concept of sense, sensibility or physics, this would also fit right in with the Fast & Furious flicks, and if they were all playing the same characters I’d barely notice. I say combine all the franchises and storylines, because fuck it, why not.

If there are members of the audience that could get into this, and somehow see themselves in Elly’s character in the way that sweaty incels see themselves in the roles played by people like Liam Neeson, Keanu, The Rock or Vin Diesel, then good luck to all of them. Maybe it’s a primal thing, for certain people to have this lingering impulse that tells them that maybe this reality isn’t completely real, and that in fact beneath the surface of the false mask we’ve been trained to wear, there lurks a special set of skills, a whole sexy backstory, and another exciting life in parallel to the actual one we live, having to endlessly pick people up from stuff or drop them off places, or ingrown toenails to deal with, or who stole my lunch from the fridge?-type mundanity.

I mean, that’s what attracts us to fiction in the first place, but ye gods, fuck this flick and what they were trying to do.

4 times Spy with Melissa McCarthy does practically the same type of story but did it much funnier and better out of 10

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“You're there because of my stress and my anxiety triggering a visual coping mechanism or something.” – yes, or something indeed - Argylle