Argylle

Alright, man, what are we doing here? We’ve moved on from the old infinite monkey theorem because we have the dread of AI, but we’re still pumping out this bullshit that feels as though it was, in fact, written by a button-mashing monkey or a very cynical artificial intelligence. Argylle is garbage. The worst kind of garbage. Partly because it’s almost two-and-a-half hours of garbage. But mostly because it’s an overly-long music video filled with terrible CGI, incredibly dumb dialogue and some seriously questionable acting. It’s unclear if the writer of this film — whose few other films have scores on IMDB hovering around 0.0 — meant this to be ironic or silly or just doubts the intelligence of other human beings. Or if he just sucks. I think, however, that director, Matthew Vaughn, thought this was going to be huge and would kick off a series to rival the James Bond franchise. Again, he’s either an idiot, a grifter or a fool. Nobody wants that. Nobody.

The only thing I can think here is that they had the idea that if they stuff a movie with enough recognizable faces, throw a bunch of hectic action scenes together and do it with a bit of humor that people would just dig it. Never mind a good script. Never mind the fact the whole movie looks like it was made with a 1992 Amiga computer and the biggest over-done gag in the film is an awful GCI cat that looks as though it was made on said computer and just used as as the bug-eyed emoji over and over again. Again, Vaughn thought this was his Die Hard. This was his Lethal Weapon. I think he clearly missed the point of those films. We cared about Bruce Willis’ John McTiernan. So when he quipped and looked into the camera, we loved it. Despite his later dalliances as a proto-Nazi, we cared about Gibson’s Riggs character and his fragile mental state. And we wanted him and Glover’s Murtaugh to just get along and get through things. This movie is not those movies. It doesn’t even retain an ounce of their DNA. I have no clue what Vaughn is on about. I wish I could say it’s because he’s British, but I think this overblown nonsense is just his thing.

The plot here is convoluted and both way too simple and overly complicated exactly where it doesn’t need to be. I looked back at another Vaughn films I reviewed, Kingsman: The Secret Service, and said almost the exact same thing. These two films live in the same universe, apparently, but didn’t have the same writer. Which leads me to believe the issue is either the concept of the whole thing. Or it’s Vaughn. Maybe he directs in such a way that it makes editing impossible. They go to stick the movie together in the edit and realize they just have a pile of shit to work with. Sure, there are a bunch of colorful explosions and camera tricks, but none of it hangs together. So you end up with a disjointed mess stuck together with insert shots, bad exposition and loads of CGI. All while we’re subjected to poor Superman, Henry Cavill, with the worst haircut since Edward Scissorhands. To the point it’s distracting. Also, Bryce Dallas Howard is a… weird choice for the movie’s heroine. And it’s not because she’s not a rail-thin action-star type. She just has this very innocent face, and kind of bookish persona that makes her super-spy persona seem like a joke. And when they ask her to do action and flirty glam, she just seems super uncomfortable. Which, in turn, makes the viewer uncomfortable. I don’t need a model in a low-cut dress with a gun strapped to her thigh (a la Dua Lipa earlier in the film), but someone strong and fierce in some way would have been more believable in the role than Dallas Howard, who was absolutely perfect as a kind of shaky normal person in Black Mirror’s “Nosedive.” And just because she looks the way she looks and acts the way she acts, I don’t need her to be the mom driving the station wagon, but for this role where a seemingly normal author turns out to be a super-spy, I don’t buy her. Author, sure. The best action spy in the world? No. Not the way Geena Davis, for instance, pulled off the same trick successfully in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Her physicality and edge just felt believable in the way Dallas Howard’s doesn’t at all. It’s cringey.

Anyway, there’s no reason for me to really go into the plot here. Suffice it to say that things explode, there are a bunch of scenes that seem to be directly ripped from various Mission: Impossible movies and, weirdly, the 1999 Catherine Zeta-Jones vehicle, Entrapment. But, mostly, it’s a deeply uninteresting film. And uninterested in anything other than spectacle. But even in that spectacle, they seemed to care very little about developing characters anyone would care about. Especially Henry Cavill’s Agent Argylle character. He’s as wooden as they come. I’m not sure if that’s intentional, or that’s just Cavill’s acting. Whatever the case, I’ve already wasted way too many words on this review. It ain’t worth you time. Nor mine.