Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle is a caper whose lack of charm prevents it from transcending the thinness of its high-concept premise. At the film’s heart is a frustrated novelist, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who discovers that the plots of her pulpy spy novels have inadvertently aligned with the real activities of a renegade organization led by the ruthless Ritter (Bryan Cranston). When Ritter orders Elly eliminated for threatening to expose his activities, the woman must rely on a competing spy, Aidan (Sam Rockwell), for protection.
With the anxiety-ridden, self-doubting Elly suddenly thrust into a life-or-death scenario, the film turns into a broad comedy, which Vaughn plays up with action scenes whose clear sense of movement is their only distinguishing qualities. The closest thing that he has to a visual stamp is an over-reliance on slow motion, stretching out every single stunt so that the viewer can study the grotesque, over-the-top facial expressions of characters tossed by an explosion or grimacing from the recoil of a fired gun. All too frequently, the film cuts in a reaction shot of Elly’s cat being thrown around as she frantically drags it with her through every chase and firefight.
It doesn’t help that the characters lack the depth that might have made their plights engaging. Neither Aidan nor Elly ever seem like real people, an issue exacerbated when the film intercuts Elly’s travails with visions of her literary creation, secret agent Argylle (Henry Cavill), in similar situations. Argylle’s scenes unfurl as a parody of spy movies, each line of dialogue a groan-worthy pun right out of a Bond movie or a smoldering statement of dedication to his mission. But it’s hard to buy into the joke given that this is also the default mode of the film’s “real life” scenes. Aidan speaks in many of the same plastic platitudes as Argylle, and Cranston’s Ritter is a repository of supervillain clichés right down to a merciless treatment of subordinates’ failures.
Argylle’s lack of gravity might have worked had the filmmakers committed to a pure send-up, but by the halfway mark the film begins to lean into a nonstop series of twists that radically recontextualize the characters. Because these characters felt so thin and ill-defined in the first place, none of these maneuvers have the intended impact of hoodwinking the audience.
Consider the mystery of how Elly can unconsciously predict the real activities of wetwork agencies. By the time the film reveals the truth behind why she’s able to do so, it’s already squandered much of the surprise by making Elly suspiciously capable as a companion to Aidan, as if too afraid to let her come off as a hapless damsel. And the more each new twist is revealed and summarily falls flat, the faster the next one is slotted into place to get ahead of the story’s anticlimax, leading to a spiral in which the plot becomes even more meaningless.
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