NATHAN WEINBENDER:
It’s been a long time since I saw a movie that made me as sad as Argylle—sad that I spent nearly two-and-a-half hours looking at it, sad that such a cynical exercise might pass for breezy entertainment, sad that valuable resources were sunk into a soulless product that only superficially resembles the artform I love so much.
This is a slick, expensive, star-studded espionage comedy that was engineered to kickstart a franchise until it landed with a thud in theaters last month. You can now rent it digitally, which is just as well, because the world of Argylle is a shiny, dead-eyed, A.I.-generated purgatory of 1’s and 0’s. That its reported $200 million price tag was picked up by Apple Studios is no surprise, because the film looks like it was shot inside a series of desktop backgrounds.
The studio also released a tie-in Argylle novel credited to one Elly Conway; per her author bio, she “wrote her first novel about Agent Argylle while working as a waitress in a late-night diner.” Who could this be? Why had no one heard of her until now? Could Elly Conway, as one internet conspiracy theory suggested, be a pseudonym for Taylor Swift, who surely has loads of free time to write lame books that will be turned into terrible movies? It’s all, of course, a marketing gimmick, dreamt up by director Matthew Vaughn and Argylle screenwriter Jason Fuchs (who probably wishes he had used an alias this time).
The very fictional Elly Conway is our protagonist, played by Bryce Dallas Howard in yet another role that wastes her inherent charm and intelligence. Elly’s potboilers about the superspy Argylle are not only flying off shelves but are apparently so technically accurate that readers have begun to wonder if, like John le Carré and Graham Greene before her, she’s a spy herself.
She’s really a borderline agoraphobe who rarely leaves her impeccably furnished lakeside cabin and whose best friend is her cat. On a trip to visit her parents, Elly encounters a guy on the train who turns out to be an actual spy. He’s played by Sam Rockwell, and he informs Elly that she’s the target of a shadowy intelligence agency headed by Bryan Cranston, angry that her books are spoiling its secrets. So the two of them go on the run through a plot of double crosses and mistaken identities and a MacGuffin called a "Masterkey." Or something. I lost track.
As if to jolt us from our reveries, the movie throws in glorified cameos from a host of famous actors: Catherine O’Hara, Richard E. Grant, Samuel L. Jackson, John Cena, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose, and Henry Cavill in fantasy sequences as the fabled Argylle. But none of them ever appear to be occupying the same physical space as the others, as if their parts were recorded individually and then stitched together with some of the most eye-searing CGI environments I’ve seen in a production of this scale.
Director Vaughn is best known for the Kick-Ass and Kingsman movies, which were adolescent and self-satisfied and generally risible but at least inspired stronger emotions than mere fatigue. Argylle drones on and on and on, and just when you think it’s reached its nadir, it keeps on digging. Its only saving grace is that Argylle will likely not return for a sequel.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.