- Argylle
- Directed by Matthew Vaughn
- Written by Jason Fuchs
- Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell and Henry Cavill
- Classification PG; 139 minutes
- Opens in theatres Feb. 2
There is a wonderfully juicy mystery at the heart of the new spy thriller Argylle. Unfortunately it is one contained entirely off-screen.
When the latest action-comedy from Kingsman director Matthew Vaughn was announced in 2022, reports noted that the material was based on a yet-to-be-published novel by first-time author Elly Conway. But, then as now, almost nothing is known about Conway. There is a short bio listed on Penguin Random House’s website noting that she was “born and raised in upstate New York” and wrote Argylle “while working as a waitress in a late-night diner.” But there are no headshots, no interviews, no book tours, no real social-media presence. It all adds up to a curiously coy PR strategy given that Conway scored a megadeal, and Apple Studios is planning a franchise based on her books.
After a little digging, The Hollywood Reporter discovered that Elly Conway might not, in fact, exist. Or, as the current rumour mill suggests, Elly Conway is actually Taylor Swift in disguise. Or perhaps J.K. Rowling. Judging by the tepid Amazon reviews that greeted the novel when it was finally published earlier this month, there is a decent chance that Conway is in fact AI. But ultimately Argylle’s authorial puzzle is not one worth solving given the horrendous state of Vaughn’s film, which arrives in theatres this weekend as one of the most chaotically stupid action movies to torture audiences in ages.
Maximizing Vaughn’s worst habits (faux-cheeky violence set to disco-pop songs, chaotic editing, juvenile humour that gives a bad name to middle-schoolers) and jettisoning his best (the anarchic wit of Kick-Ass and the first Kingsman movie, the sharp casting and performances of Layer Cake and X-Men: First Class), the director’s latest is a marathon-length migraine. It is so aggressively mindless and artlessly hollow that it almost has to be seen to be believed. Almost.
Don’t be fooled by the meta-contextual set-up, either, which focuses on lonely novelist Elly Conway (yep), whose series of spy thrillers focusing on the James Bond-like Agent Argylle are burning up the bestseller charts. While Conway (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) spends her days dreaming up Argylle’s antics (embodied in fantasy form by Henry Cavill), it turns out that her stories are also accurately predicting real-world espionage events. After her latest book ends on a cliffhanger of world-altering consequences, Elly finds herself being pursued by myriad black-op agents (including Sam Rockwell’s good-guy spy Aidan and Bryan Cranston’s scowling villain) who desperately need to know what happens next.
From left: Argylle (Henry Cavill), Lagrange (Dua Lipa) and Wyatt (John Cena).Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures, Apple Original Films, and MARV/Universal Pictures
That might sound clever – a writer discovering that her imagination is in fact the most powerful thing on Earth, with the supposed author of the original text having her own content warped to carry out such a beyond-the-page conceit – but Argylle only offers the illusion of wit.
The screenplay, credited solely to Jason Fuchs (with the name “Elly Conway” entirely absent from the onscreen credits), is a sloppy pileup of lousy twists that eventually cancel each other out to the point that the story ceases to make a single lick of sense. And don’t be suckered in by the slivers of self-awareness – such as when Samuel L. Jackson’s spymaster character yells to no one in particular, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” – because they are only inserted as cruel jokes to the audience: We know this is torture – but we’re not going to stop!
Combined with distressingly empty-headed action sequences – including one set-piece involving an oil spill, ice-skating, and gunfire whose CGI is so sloppy that it will make you divest your Apple stock – and distressingly grating performances from actors who should and do know better (Sam Rockwell, no!), and you have the first true cinematic disaster of this young year.
Perhaps Vaughn deserves a grudging bit of backward respect for his chutzpah in extending Argylle’s misery straight past the film’s “ending”: there is a post-credits scene here so needlessly bewildering that only the most hardened of Vaughn scholars will be able to decipher it. But otherwise Argylle is evidence that more than a few people need to be exfiltrated from Hollywood post-haste. If you are indeed out there, Elly Conway, please do stay in the shadows. No need to come in from the cold for this mess.