Review: Argylle (Patreon)

Do you know Rogert Ebert's review of North? The one with the infamous "I hated this movie" rant? Yeah.

There was a moment where I was willing to give Argylle a chance. And then the plot started. At the outset, we get a silly but reasonably entertaining prologue about Henry Cavill and Dua Lipa as spies that's revealed to be the cliché-ridden writing of spy novelist Elly Conway, played by Bryce Dallas Howard. OK, I thought. Romancing the Stone about spy novels. Nothing terribly objectionable about this. And there's a later moment where Howard has to write the next chapter of her spy novel to move a real-life spy mission forward. It's a moment of genuine cleverness, one that gave me hope this movie not be complete schlock.

Then there's every other minute of Argylle, which is altogether garish, idiotic, and downright mean-spirited. Argylle has a a plot twist every other second, never committing to a plot beat for more than two seconds, simply throwing in twists for the sake of having a twist. Nothing ever settles long enough for the audience to go "OK, this is how this works now." There's no dramatic or logical throughline: there's simply one bullshit scene after another. Suddenly the spy agency from Howard's books are real -- a fact to which she has no reaction beat -- and then suddenly Sam Rockwell is apparently her enemy and not her friend, and then Bryan Cranston, who leads the agency, is actually her dad, and then Bryce Cranston and Catherine O'Hara turn out not to be her parents but evil spies who've brainwashed her. Argylle is a collection of scenes with virtually no premise, simply Matthew Vaughn screaming "oooh, shiny" at the audience for more than two fucking hours.

The central plot twist -- that Bryce Dallas Howard is actually a spy who's been brainwashed by her adversaries into becoming a novelist -- is the most egregious part of all. Leaving aside the sheer stupidity of a covert spy agency brainwashing a spy to write bestselling novels that cast them as villains, it's a completely dramatically unearned beat. Howard -- a nepo baby whose father peaked on The Andy Griffith Show when he was 10 -- does not actually have a character. She simply screams and cringes while Sam Rockwell kills henchmen and tells her she needs to be a badass spy. She is simply there to have men fight over her and use her. It's ugly, misgoynistic, and worst of all, completely fucking stupid.

So yeah. To paraphrase Rogert Ebert, I hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this fucking movie. I've never seen a Matthew Vaughn film before, but if he's capable of shooting this ugly mess (the frame rate spike and out-of-place Eighties pop music during the fight scenes), I don't want to even hear about Kingsman ever again. This might be the worst spy film I've ever seen. Die Another Day has more moments of watchability than this piece of shit. I'm disappointed in geniuses like Sam Rockwell and Samuel L. Jackson (yes, he's in this for absolutely no reason!) for agreeing to be in Argylle. The more I think about this movie, the more contempt I develop for it. May it freeze in the ninth circle of movie Hell, next to Bohemian Rhapsody and Forrest Gump.