Hot off the tour of her fourth book, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) returns to her home on the lakefront where she lives with her cat, Alfie, and begins working on the next installment of her Agent Argylle series.  When she shares her latest draft with her mother, Ruth (Catherine O’Hara), she is distraught because it ends on a cliffhanger.  The two make plans to meet up and workshop a final chapter, but on the train to see her, Elly is approached by Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a real-life spy, informing her that she is in danger because her latest novel came a little too close to revealing an actual global crime syndicate and the only way to ensure her own safety is to follow him. 

Matthew Vaughn directs Argylle, his latest, highly stylized, action comedy set in the world of espionage from a script penned by Jason Fuchs.  Headed to Apple TV+ after its theatrical release from Universal, the film was prefaced with a buzzy ad campaign that was counting on going viral on social media.  Part of that was allowing a rumor that Taylor Swift was the actual writer to run rampant across the internet, and while the “fan theory” does hold some weight when you consider that Elly is written as an insufferable pick-me girl, even with as absolutely dumb as the script for Argylle is, it still contains a modicum more of cleverness that tends to be absent from Swift’s lyrics.  Despite the starry cast including Dua Lipa, John Cena, and Ariana DeBose among others, at a punishing 140 minutes, Vaughn’s self-proclaimed twisted style is oppressive, and the script pummels every joke so that the entire experience becomes a drawn-out and laborious chore.  

The film opens playfully enough with a car chase through Greece as Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) is in hot pursuit of Dua Lipa’s Lagrange.  The James Bond spoof sets a difficult precedent for the rest of the action scenes to come in that it looks very rough and unfinished.  When it is revealed that this sequence is a visualization of what is happening in the novel, we begin to think this was a purposeful choice, but the film will quickly let us down. Given that it was bankrolled by Apple, it is shocking how little of the bloated budget went to funding the effects house since the company is so preoccupied with its own aesthetic and made sure that Vaughn captured plenty of shots of the characters swiping through on their little iPads.  The Bond films have long been covert commercials for luxury brands even going so far as to re-edit No Time to Die (2021) as 007’s cutting-edge tech had already hit the market in the time from when it was shot to when it was released after its Covid delay so it is no surprise here that Apple, desperate for a franchise of note to bring to their streamer would also have their products featured heavily throughout, but it is surprising that they allowed the film to look the way it does with all its seams still showing.  Even in the slower scenes of which there are few, the entire thing looks like actors were filmed totally separate from each other which further hinders performances already held back by an impenetrable script. 

Also left to puzzle over the script is the audience.  Double-crossing is to be expected in spy films, but as the story drags on and characters begin to get triple, quadruple, and possibly even quintuple-crossed, it all devolves into nonsense.  Instead of building suspense, Fuchs teaches the audience that nothing anyone says ultimately matters by continually relying on this deceitful pattern.  The perverse bright side of all of this is that character actions become so hard to follow that allegiances become largely irrelevant meaning that each scene can exist as its own absurd sketch, unimpacted by what came before and with no real bearing on what comes next so audiences will not miss much if they find themselves struggling to keep awake.  

That lack of building towards anything permeates into a lack of transitionary material at large.  A prime example of this comes at the finale which, apparently, takes place on a large oil freighter in the middle of the ocean.  Perhaps there is a brief mention that Ritter (Bryan Cranston), the man whose criminal machinations are dangerously close to being revealed should Agent Argylle #5 go to press, is operating off of the boat, but it really feels like they just appeared there.  Possibly, this is all part of the joke, but this late in the film, any attempt at humor that is so completely unfunny, unsupported, and unfocused just adds to the audience’s ire.   

Further, the deeper one thinks about the plot of the film, the less and less it all makes sense.  At its core, Elly and Aidan are being pursued by Ritter because he believes they know where The Silver Bullet is, a file that contains top secret information like the real identities of his field agents.  The twist is that Elly is actually Rachel Kyle – or R. Kyle – a field agent who was in love with Aidan before going undercover in Ritter’s organization, and then being brainwashed to tell him where his own file was; a file which, since she already had, therefore her boss, Alfie (Samuel L. Jackson), by extension would also have.  But now, nobody has it and everybody wants it, and since it is handled with such a loose understanding that it is supposed to be important, it is next to impossible to figure out or understand what is on the drive and why either of these factions want it other than that the script requires a race to find it. 

In conclusion, and already at the risk of beating the film’s flaws to death beyond how the film itself beats its own jokes far past their own expiration, Argylle is, in the simplest of terms, a failed execution at almost every creative choice.  On paper, it is clear why Vaughn was drawn to the material, but in contrast with Kingsmen: The Secret Service (2014) where he was allowed to indulge his style and provocations, Argylle feels like it was hijacked by a marketing team desperately trying to break into the social media algorithms.  Fuchs’ toying with the tropes is too broad to be satirical and comes off more as bad writing than a genre roast which the film is vying for, but the biggest failure of the film is that it just is not fun.  Released too early for the Valentine’s Day frame where it may have felt more at home given the covert love story but then would have to compete with Madame Web who has already clogged that weekend, it would not have changed the dreadful content of the film, but it would have felt like a little more thought was put into this release.  If nothing else, though, the house-up lighting cue does reward the dedicated audience with a slight chortle before leaving the auditorium; not enough to absolve itself but Vaughn has saved the best for last as this slight amusement is the best part of this misaligned and ill-conceived film.