Have you ever watched a super-twisty movie that wound up being too smart for its own good?
I’m afraid that’s the case with Apple’s thriller Argylle, currently streaming on a variety of platforms.
There is enough good stuff here to keep the film from feeling like a total waste of time; yet the script eventually takes so many left turns that it swiftly switches from a bit too smart, to way too stupid and outlandish.
Happily, the good stuff starts with a knock-out cast: Bryce Dallas Howard stars as bestselling spy novelist Elly Conway, who has an uncanny grasp of espionage and skullduggery. In fact, Elly is so good at predicting how spies will act and think, that she gets targeted by rival organizations who both want her help retrieving a certain computer file.
First in line to grab Conway is apparent good-guy Aiden Wilde, played by the incomparable Sam Rockwell. While Sam’s wise-cracking, slacker persona seems counterintuitive for a skilled assassin, he pulls it off beautifully, and we wind up caring a lot about these two — even hoping they might develop more than just a working relationship.
The cast also includes Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, Samuel L. Jackson, John Cena and Sofia Boutella — along with pop stars Dua Lipa and Ariana Debose. Henry Cavill brings a strong “meta” feel to the proceedings as Conway’s main character, who repeatedly shows up in the real-world plotline, even as the author’s life keeps looking more and more like one of her books.
Several of these actors play impressively against type. Though it might spoil things to mention them all, I will say it’s nice to see Jackson as a decent fellow who never drops even one of his characteristic F-bombs.
In fact, Argylle’s admirable restraint with language, gore and sex sets it apart from other recent action-comedies like Bullet Train and Cocaine Bear, where the bloodshed got to the point of being no-longer-funny.
Other worthy features: superb editing in the action scenes; an excellent score and soundtrack (with generous doses of Debose); and dandy, colorful, globetrotting production design as the movie moves from Colorado and Chicago to Hong Kong, France, London, Greece and the Arabian Peninsula.
The script also unloads generous references to other material both in and out of the genre — including Ian Fleming, John LeCarre, Michael Caine, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, The Manchurian Candidate and even O’Hara’s beloved role in Home Alone.
Nonetheless, about halfway through, Jason Fuchs’s script takes three wild turns in about as many minutes — at which point, the whole story flies right off the rails. While one admires the audacity and surprise, these twists are all so preposterous that they make mincemeat of the women and men and motivations. As the film then continues in this mode, it does eventually glue back together one or two pieces of its broken credibility. But by then, so much silly and impossible stuff has happened that it’s clear Fuchs’s only goal is trickery — to which he gladly sacrifices his characters; and so the film ditches its chief merit: our care and concern for its people. By the end, it has become something of a comic book: colorful and fight-filled, but operating largely in only two dimensions.
Director Matthew Vaughn has expressed an intention for two sequels — and then to connect the resulting trilogy to his own Kingsman franchise. But neither critics nor viewers cared much for Argylle — to the point where it recouped less than half its $200 million budget.
So I’m not sure Apple will want to pour more money into this somewhat leaky bucket — though they certainly have the funds, and Lord knows lousy films have launched plenty of other franchises in our time.
Argylle might not be legitimately “lousy”; but it sure could have been a whole lot better.
