'Argylle' Has No Shortage of Starpower, But It’s Wasted On This Overstuffed Spy Caper

Argylle gives us something we really don’t need right now: another exhausting, long-ass Matthew Vaughn movie.

The British filmmaker/Guy Ritchie collaborator/husband of Claudia Schiffer has always had trouble deleting scenes from his lengthy genre spectaculars. Even his most elaborately entertaining flicks, like his fairy-tale rom-com Stardust or his 007 send-up/comic-book adaptation Kingsman: The Secret Service, could’ve been brisk, fun rides if dude just shaved off a half-hour of footage. It’s a shame DVDs and Blu-rays aren’t big deals anymore; he could just dump the scenes he hated parting with in the special features section.

Clocking in at 139 minutes, Argylle has Vaughn on another espionage romp. The man has been leaning hard into the spy genre as of late, turning Kingsman into a full-fledged movie franchise (complete with an inferior sequel and a prequel that flopped because of freakin’ COVID), and Argylle appears to be the starting point for another spy-covered universe. 

We got shapely nepo baby Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly Conway, a neurotic, introverted spy novelist who only has time for two things: her work and her cat, Alfie. She’s having a hard time wrapping up the fifth installment in her Argylle saga, where the dashing, titular superagent (Henry Cavill — who else?) and his beefy sidekick (a surprisingly underused John Cena) go around the world taking out terrorists (the opening minutes has pop queen Dua Lipa doing a glorified cameo as a slinky, lethal baddie) and rogue syndicates.

Elly gets reluctantly roped into a mission when she meets Aiden (Sam Rockwell), an eccentric-but-effective operative who informs her that her novels have been predicting the covert actions of an actual evil spy organization (led by a cartoonishly diabolical Bryan Cranston) — and he needs her to come up with an ending to see what they’ll do next. 

With Argylle, Vaughn has made a madcap spy spectacle that you could watch with your parents. Whereas the Kingsman movies were gleefully vulgar and violent, the blood and gore don’t flow as freely in this flick. It’s like Vaughn made an action comedy for all those who grew up playing Mortal Kombat with the “No Blood” option faithfully enabled. 

But toned-down violence isn’t what makes Argylle so damn frustrating. Vaughn and actor/screenwriter Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman) patch together a convoluted comic thriller where, if you’ve seen any spy flick of the past 30 years, you see all the twists coming. I could literally list all the movies this flick bites heavily from (including a successful blockbuster franchise starring someone Howard once did a Clint Eastwood movie with). But that would kinda let the cat out the bag — a figure of speech Vaughn literally materializes onscreen, as Howard spends most of her screen time schlepping her pet around in a ventilated backpack. Along with the fact that Howard resembles the redheaded author Taylor Swift played in her “All Too Well” short film/magnum opus, this has Swifties believing their queen secretly wrote the film. (If that’s true, then where are the shitty exes?)  

With the unlikely pairing of Howard and Rockwell carrying most of the movie, I get a sense Vaughn wanted to do a jet-setting spy adventure starring average-looking, middle-aged folk. (Those Red movies already beat him to the punch.) It’s a sight even Howard’s protagonist has trouble swallowing, as she constantly pictures Cavill’s foxy agent taking the place of Rockwell’s schlubby spy during fight scenes (which for some reason are annoyingly set to classic disco tunes). Rockwell certainly plays up his role as a veteran badass who’s officially too old for the shit. One scene that definitely hit home for me has Rockwell trying to reach for a live grenade after he throws his back out fighting with an assassin. (Thankfully, the grenade blast fixes his back.)

Howard and Rockwell also play the only characters Vaughn and Fuchs bothered to fully flesh out. It’s kinda crazy how, for a movie with literally so much time to kill, they round up a lot of big names to play undeveloped characters. They waste so many charismatic performers, and that includes Catherine O’Hara as Conway’s meddlesome mom, Ariana DuBose as a tech whiz in the Argylle universe, and Samuel L. Jackson as the Man with All the Answers.

By the time you get to the elongated, heavily packed climax, which includes deadly ice skating and a corny-but-colorful dance sequence/shootout, you’ll most likely be worn out by Argylle’s silly spy shenanigans. Of course, there’s a mid-credits sequence that sets up the next chapter. But considering how long and derivative this volume is, I have a feeling most moviegoers may close the book on Argylle.