“This was our song,” a man murmurs to a woman as they tenderly sway to the music across the dance floor. The song in question is “Now and Then,” a “new” song by the “Beatles” that was released in November 2023— nearly two years after principal photography wrapped on Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle. The song, in which the two surviving Beatles members “collaborated” with recordings of their bandmates from an unfinished piece, pops up in Argylle a few times, and while at the end of the day its inclusion isn’t necessarily a big deal, its use as a supposed bit of nostalgia for the film’s leads indicates the lazy streak that runs through Vaughn and writer Jason Fuch’s spy movie pastiche, which doesn’t so much falter as it does pratfall across a series of misguided narrative and technical choices across its two hour and twenty minute runtime.
When we first meet author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), she’s at a bookstore promoting the fourth novel in her popular series about a dashing spy called Agent Argylle. Based on the responses of those in the audience, Elly is a respected writer with a lot of fans, one of whom even asks her out in the middle of the Q&A. But afterwards, Elly returns to her remote home, where she lives alone with her cat Alfie, for a long night of writing. Her life is, by all accounts, not very exciting, and even a little lonely— the exact opposite of her globe-trotting protagonist. That is, until a train ride into the city to visit her parents— Elly’s mom, Ruth (Catherine O’Hara) promised to help her figure out the ending for the fifth Argylle book— takes a sudden turn that plunges Elly into the realm of espionage that she had hitherto only written about.
Accompanied by Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a rough-and-tumble agent who only appears as the suave spy Elly envisioned in flashes (he’s played by Henry Cavill, with the world’s worst haircut), Elly finds that a nefarious organization is targeting her because she has so aptly predicted real-world events in her novels. This fairly straightforward premise fast becomes overly convoluted as Argylle piles on outrageous twist after outrageous twist. This is a remarkably smug movie, every reveal played with a self-satisfied smirk as the screenplay insists on holding its audience’s hand through the whole ordeal. Each twist is accompanied by dramatic music and shots that linger, leaning into drama that holds no emotional weight for the viewer because the characters involved are such thinly-sketched archetypes (as likable as Dallas Howard and Rockwell are, neither of them can overcome these shortcomings), followed by a lot of clumsy exposition.
Anyone familiar with Vaughn’s previous work will know, however, that he is not a subtle filmmaker. His Kingsman movies have become a series of diminishing returns: the first one was fun and fairly fresh, its sequel largely a misfire elevated by some kooky turns, and its prequel a chore and a bore. But at least those movies had some well-choreographed action scenes here and there, even though Vaughn is a director who clearly prefers style over staging. Argylle is not only a confusing film, it’s an ugly one, bogged down in chintzy CGI (during one of its climatic fight scenes, you can barely even see the characters involved because they are obscured by different colored clouds of smoke) and klutzy, frantic editing. And because it is rated PG-13, it doesn’t even possess the gleeful gore of the Kingsman films. Sure, this is all made up anyway; even the best spy movies, the ones that Argylle is pulling from (Bond, of course, but also the hyper-violent action movies of 1980s Hollywood in the vein of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon) present its audiences with a heightened version of reality. But every inch of Argylle is fake: the locations. The cat. The Beatles song. And the notion— based on the audacity this film had to include a mid-credits scene setting up an inevitable prequel— that anyone cares to see any of this continued further.
Argylle is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 139 minutes. Rated PG-13.
Katie at the Movies 