'Argylle' Slinks into Theaters This Weekend

Argylle, the star-studded spy comedy movie from the director of Kick-Ass, will enter this theaters this weekend in hopes of reviving a movie business that mostly slept through January. Given that its only competition is a bunch of hold-overs and a new entry in a Christian movie franchise, Argylle is likely to win the weekend. But its overwhelmingly negative critics' reviews suggest that it's not going to make a giant splash in the long run. Read on for details.

Via Variety.

What looks like diamonds but on closer inspection turns out to be little more than reams of cheap polyester? Why, argyle, of course — that preppy pattern found on socks and sweaters, and an apt name for the latest kooky spy caper from Matthew Vaughn. The erstwhile “Kick-Ass” director has been trapped in “Kingsman” mode for so long (going on a decade now) that it feels like we’ve lost him to that kind of live-action cartoon forever, cramming Gen Z James Bond riffs with disco music and over-the-top greenscreen shenanigans.

“Argylle” boasts an entirely new set of characters, but sticks to Vaughn’s CG-exaggerated aesthetic as hacky spy novelist Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) gets pulled into a scheme nearly identical to the one she described in her bestselling series of books. She invented a character called Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill, looking silly in a stuffed Nehru jacket and sky-high hairdo) who’s uncovered a secret pision of rogue agents, creatively named the pision. That plot is so close to reality — or the movie’s catawampus version of reality — that actual rogue agents come out of the woodwork to eliminate Elly.

If the broad strokes of Jason Fuchs’ script seem to have been borrowed outright from such pulp-flavored adventure movies as “The Lost City” and “Romancing the Stone,” or else spy-memoir satires “Hopscotch” and “Burn After Reading,” that doesn’t negate the fact that they provide a reasonably fun way for Vaughn to place a female protagonist in the middle of a typically testosterone-heavy genre. (There were women in his Kingsman movies, but it remained mostly a guy’s game.) Here, Howard appears front and center, and though the “Jurassic World” star is technically a nepo baby, she reads as a relatable Everywoman in this context: the right choice to play a redheaded writer who’d rather cozy up with her Scottish Fold cat, Alfie, than do anything remotely dangerous.

The movie opens with a set-piece from Elly’s latest Argylle book, flamboyantly staged to Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything” and featuring jaunty cameos from Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose and John Cena — collectively too arch to be believed. Vaughn wants audiences to suspect the artifice and get a laugh out of the clunky clichés being served up and subverted, while innocuously planting seeds that will pay off later in the movie. The scene turns out to be a book reading, where avid fans demand to know when the next installment is due. Except, Elly doesn’t know how to finish the story.

Stuffing Alfie in a travel-cat backpack and booking a ticket to meet her mom (a hilarious Catherine O’Hara, whose comic instincts strike just the right note), Elly discovers that practically every other passenger on the train wants to kill her. Everyone but Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a shaggy-looking bum who identifies himself as a spy and proceeds to dispatch the dozens of would-be assassins on board. Looks — like practically everything else in this movie — can be deceiving. In a neat trick, Vaughn shoots the sequence from Elly’s perspective, cutting back and forth between Argylle and Aidan. Could this uncouth stranger be the inspiration for her dapper character? Is real-world spycraft so different from what she imagined?

The scene ends with an ultra-fake parachute escape, so visually unconvincing it stands in stark contrast with Tom Cruise’s latest “Mission: Impossible” outing.

Get the rest of the story at Variety.