'Argylle' Has So Many Twists M. Night Shyamalan Could Call It 'Too Much'
While this has not been explicitly stated anywhere, I can only assume that Argylle was created solely with the Guinness Book of World Records' "Most Twists in a Motion Picture" award in mind. The spy thriller from Kingsman creator Matthew Vaughn delivers its first big reveal around the movie's halfway point and then proceeds to reveal and reveal and reveal and reveal as if it's a drag queen competing in the final lip sync of RuPaul's Drag Race. Unfortunately, as with drag queens shedding layers of clothing on their way to spandex unitard, Argylle's twists deliver diminishing returns with each additional "but wait, there's more."
But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves. Argylle is the latest star-studded effort from from Vaughn and opens with your standard James Bond/Mission: Impossible style antics. Henry Cavill plays a dashing secret agent named Aubrey Argylle who is attempting to bring down an evil organization known as the Directorate. He's assisted by his bestie Wyatt (John Cena, in Hawaiian shirts) and their techie sidekick Keira (Ariana DeBose, doing very little of the thing). While on a Grecian mission to get a computer file from LaGrange (Dua Lipa, or Dula Peep if you're Wendy Williams), however, the story ends because this is all actually just the plot of a bestselling spy novel. The story we've been watching is actually from an Argylle novel written by hit sensation Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard).
Elly, who lives with her cat in a secluded, writerly abode, is putting the finishing touches on the fifth Argylle novel, but her overbearing mother (Catherine O'Hara) is frustrated that the novel includes yet another cliffhanger. She invites Elly to visit and discuss wrapping up the series. However, on a train ride to visit her mom, Elly is attacked by numerous assailants and saved by a secret agent named Aidan (Sam Rockwell), who explains that the events in Elly's books mirror events in the real life spy world. Now evil organizations are trying to kidnap her and use her as a type of crime oracle. What ensues is two hours of a cat-and-and mouse game with Elly and Aidan trying to solve the mystery of where a secret USB drive is before the baddies.
If this plot seems kind of silly and contrived, that's because it is, but Argylle bravely (and near perfectly) executes one of my favorite bait-and-switch tactics in which a movie is willing to start out bad in order for the twist to make it genius. When the first twist is revealed and everything snaps into place, my internal rating bumped the previously C-level film up to an A. Unfortunately, as the last hour labored through 40 more twists, my hard-earned affection began to dwindle.
Argylle's bungling of what could have been a successful ending, however, is just the latest in a string of such endeavors for Vaughn. After making a name for himself with Kick-Ass and successfully rebooting the X-Men franchise with First Class, Vaughn surprised many with the unexpected success of Kingsman: The Secret Service in 2014. The February release blew up the box office, earned raves from critics and immediately garnered a sequel. Since then, however, Vaughn has continued to misunderstand what made that film great, opting to kill off the original's most beloved character and cram The Golden Circle with bloated, CGI-laded fight scenes and over-the-top shenanigans that lacked heart. The sequel performed poorly, and The King's Man, a prequel about the founding of the British spy organization, ground the franchise to a halt with poor reviews and a beleaguered box office. Both of the follow-ups relied too heavily on so-outlandish-they're-somehow-boring fight scenes and not-as-clever-as-they-think-they-are twists.
While Argylle on the surface is a completely different franchise and is not written by Vaughn (it's written by Ice Age: Continental Drift's screenwriter Jason Fuchs), it suffers from all the same problems as the ancillary Kingsman movies. In an attempt to outdo the Gazelle vs. Eggsy and Colin Firth church fight scenes in Secret Service, Argylle includes two action sequences trying so hard to be interesting that they're inexplicable. A smoke-bomb dance number and an oil slick ice-skating tribute both make little sense and look horrible thanks to cheap visual effects. Ironically, Vaughn's best fight scene (The King's Man's Rasputin battle) is just two people in a room and succeeds based on character dynamics, choreography and music without an abundance of special effects.
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Similarly, the plot of Secret Service is fairly straightforward compared to Argylle, but relies heavily on well-drawn characters that the audience immediately latches onto. Argylle seems unable to trust its leads to carry the story and so attempts to prop them up with dozens of plot points and bizarre set pieces. That's really not needed though. Bryce Dallas Howard (who seems a magnet to ill-fated projects) is well cast as Elly. She and Rockwell have delightful banter, and the supporting cast, including Dua Lipa, Catherine O'Hara and Bryan Cranston perform strongly. Even Ariana DeBose and Sofia Boutella, who have maybe five minutes of screen time combined, bring a little extra zazz to the movie.
There really is plenty to love here. The initial premise is smart. The needle drops overlayed on the fight scenes (especially in the train) add energy. There are plenty of funny zinger's from O'Hara and Conway's backpack cat is cute. It all just gets cluttered and confused as the movie tries to do too much.
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Perhaps this can all be summed up with two examples of how Argylle's lack of clarity keeps shooting itself in the foot. First, in the post-credit scene (SPOILERS TO FOLLOW), we see a young man enter a bar called The King's Man, where he receives a gun and is called "Aubrey Argylle." We then get a sign card that states a new movie about Book One of the Argylle series is coming. Presumably this means that Argylle is actually a Kingsman agent, and that we'll be getting a crossover film about a young Argylle in the Kingsman sometime in the future. But the whole thing is opaque and confusing given the "book in a movie" plot device. So the upcoming movie would be a movie based on a fake novel that is in a movie that is actually tied into another movie franchise...but then does the Kingsman agency only exist in the fictional book world created by Elly Conway? Seemingly not, because in The King's Man, they're doing battle with actual historical figures.
This confusion also bore itself out in a real world saga involving Taylor Swift in which Swifties believed a real world Argylle novel, with the author listed as Elly Conway, was actually written by Swift. While this was revealed to be a movie-tie-in prop that's "written" by the fictional character Elly Conway (i.e. a ghost writer in real life posing as the fictional movie character), it caused massive confusion online when people thought the movie was based on the book and that somehow Swift was behind both properties.
While Argylle may be smarter than its trailer sets it up to be, it's never quite as clever as its creators think it is. Rather, it devolves into a cluttered landscape of mystery and muddle that will leave audiences asking "WTF?"
Grade: C+
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