Like many others, I must have seen the trailer for this movie at least fifty times. One of the reasons why I was happy about this film finally coming out was that I knew I wouldn’t have to watch that trailer again. It is the same trailer that had me worried about Argylle from the beginning, as it seemed… not great. February release, big names, everything looking fake and the premise that seemed to have relied heavily on who the real agent Argylle was. I had a strange feeling that this might be a first flop by Matthew Vaughn, who’s done well despite not all his movies hitting as hard. And Argylle is… okay.
Whereas the first Kingsman movie (Kingsman: The Secret Service, 2014) was an awesome love letter to all spy films (but mainly the James Bond franchise), Argylle is fractured. Part of it takes place in the author’s (Bryce Dallas Howard) head, another in real life; there is a twist coming our way, and it… simply doesn’t mesh well all together. The entire film feels disjointed, contrary to the past when Vaughn knew how to combine action with comedy and understood how to film them effectively. Argylle still has some fun moments and great action scenes (mainly in the second half); however, the CGI creeps in heavily and takes you out of the illusion. The opening scene featuring Henry Cavill and Dua Lipa has one of the most outrageous “driving away” CGI scenes I have ever seen in the cinema. The CGI is so bad that instead of Greece (where that story is supposed to take place), you are pulled out of the movie, and it hasn’t properly started yet!
What’s probably not helping is that I am watching (and re-watching) all the James Bond movies, and even the weaker ones have one thing going for them – they were shot in real locations, and it shows. The CGI in Argylle is not necessarily bad, but there is something about these big set pieces that don’t photograph well yet, and you can always tell the actors are in the studio. The shadows, elements, the scene… everything just looks more realistic when shot on location because it is! And I get it; if they did it today, this movie would have doubled its budget because it’s expensive and a logistical nightmare to travel, but… Hollywood needs to figure something else out if they want to continue shooting these “worldwide adventure” movies, and the world we see is a projection of Greece, Italy or Japan rather than the actual locations.
One thing this film did well was the casting. Bryce Dallas Howard is an underrated actress who should have been the lead in more films, and she is great in this film. I won’t talk more about her because then we would have to go to spoilers, but her performance worked for me, no matter what was happening on the screen. The same applies to Sam Rockwell; I thought he was a great pick for a more realistic agent, and I liked his comedic scenes as much as his serious ones. Cavill, Dua Lipa and John Cena were all fine with what they had to work with as those characters were stuck in this fantasy world where they had to perform a certain way. I thought it was a waste of mainly Henry’s time, but hey, I hope he had some fun.
As someone who recently adopted a cat, I appreciated the cat element, even though I am still not sure whether the movie had to rely on that cat for as much. There are only so many times seeing this one cat in that one bag can be funny. I wouldn’t be surprised if they added more cat scenes purely so they could use more of her in that one trailer, so that tagline “once you know the secret, don’t let the cat out of the bag” makes more sense.
The main issue with Argylle is that this film is trying to do a bit too much at once, and only some of those elements work. The cast – mostly works. The CGI is mostly bad. The twist – it’s fine. But it’s nothing that would blow your mind or even change how you feel about the movie. The story itself is also okay, but this department was where the film struggled the most in balancing the comedy element with the real-life spy element while having some stakes. And don’t even get me started on the last scene, where the reality just breaks entirely, and it felt as almost Vaughn put it there just to fuck with us.
And it’s this intentional “fuckery” that hurts this movie the most. Vaughn understands his schtick and reputation, which makes his choices more predictable because it feels like he is embracing his image too much if it makes sense. Let me put it this way – if we go back to Kingsman, it worked not because it was Vaughn being Vaughn. That movie worked because you could feel the love for the genre from that movie. It worked because it also did not rely on just that and tried to do a spy movie for modern audiences. Argylle, on the other hand, feels like Vaughn said: “They expect this from me; therefore, this is what I will deliver.” He gave us some fun scenes (although I can see how, for example, the ice skating scene will split the audience), but they all felt like the bare minimum. They all felt, for the lack of a better word, soulless. The same as the CGI, it felt all artificial, somewhat expected and predictable. Also, this film is long. The runtime of 139 minutes is something you have to justify to your audience, and I don’t think this movie did that. You can easily edit around 20 minutes from this movie, and who knows, maybe it might have resulted in a much better picture…?
Overall, Argylle is not as bad as I feared, but it’s also the most okay film Matthew Vaughn has made until now. There are great things about it (mainly the cast) and some bad things about it (mostly the CGI). The worst part is that I enjoy Vaughn’s movies, and I don’t mind when directors make big swings and miss or strike out. But Argylle didn’t even feel like a big swing; it just felt like a by-the-numbers spy movie, which is not a sentence I wanted to write alongside the name Matthew Vaughn.
That’s all for this one! Did you see it? What did you think about it? Let me know!
Until next time,
Luke