When the plots of reclusive author Elly Conway's fictional espionage novels begin to mirror the covert actions of a real-life spy organization, quiet evenings at home become a thing of the past. Ac...
So much of the trailer for “Argylle” reminded me of The Lost City: a struggling artist getting dragged into a real-life expectation or mission due to real life events that mirrors what they wrote in books made out of snippets and narrative beats from much better movies. Little did I know that watching this movie would feel like that one too: only more discombobulated with its own identity.
If you were to tell me Matthew Vaughn’s usual transgressive kitsch style that made Kingsman such a standout was handicapped here, you would not hear me complaining. Being downright silly in the face of a solid premise is normally his M.O but his direction feels strained in this instance; nothing about it screams frantic and yet, it doesn’t look any more convincing than the other works he’s done.
Very bombastic and loud is the best I can describe the approach to the cinematography here; it’s almost intentionally chaotic in its composition and it even ties over to how nifty SOME of the editing is. What’s not so steadfast is how homogeneous and sterile the production design feels because it’s impossible not to think of it as an uncanny valley in and of itself. I’ll get more into this later but its attempts to gradually add nuance to these secret locales are distracting while giving off the allure we’d expect from a spy movie. There’s no muted color palette thankfully but it also being overlit and waxy rips away some of that scope the film desperately wanted to build to.
Not even 10 minutes in, rubbery CGI coats the presentation in a cheesy light and the oppressive digital quality doesn’t exactly improve from there. Needle drops for the soundtrack feel random at best but Lorne Balfe’s musical score fits the genre, as standardizing as that sounds.
And it doesn’t help that the performances are so wildly inconsistent. Even with so much to maneuver around and adjust, Bryce Dallas Howard succeeds in delivering the films best performance by a country mile. Samuel L. Jackson and Sam Rockwell make dividends with how little their characters are given but everyone else is a bloody charisma vacuum, through no fault of their own.
Luckily, the off-kilter fight scenes that Vaughn specializes so well in are still in full effect. Yes, they continue to be technically janky, I’ve never been huge on shaky cam and not ALL of them hit due to deadening repetition (that hallway sequence near the end was a buggy-eyed ) but they’re still mostly quirky and operatic in how they’re presented if not a tad bit underwhelming.
From a personal standpoint, I do get annoyed when I’m advertised one thing and I get delivered something different but I’m under the mindset of, ‘As long if it’s executed in a way that’s engaging, I can give it a pass’. Somehow, both the structure and presentation for this story feels like both a classic corporate bait-and-switch and a creative vision undone by its own excesses. This whole plot revolves around a standard McGuffin chase, a shadowy rogue spy organization and hints of an amnesia plot; basic narrative threads we’ve seen over 100 times before but a part of me really wants to say it’s used in a way that feels cheekily referential to where we can justify the familiarity. Nowhere should its ambition be considered lazy…..more than it is frustrating. When they don’t lean into the looniness of this adventure, they recycle ideas and imagery from better projects.
It’s one thing to make a story cartoonish by design but this movie feels like it’s constantly chasing its own tail to the point where it’s constantly getting smoke blown up its ass. Jason Fuchs’s script compromises that by having manageable pacing but then the twists come along and the more they pile on, the faster the films’ quality takes a considerable nosedive. At first glance and upon deeper inspection, the first batch of twists are welcome; there’s a dab of magic-realism touches that complement the conjunction of Elly's writing and the reality of espionage, plus it makes for an interesting reflection on where inspiration comes from and how much control artists truly have over the ideas that pop into our heads.
But that style of literary-fiction doesn’t carry over to how deliberately confusing the world and its rules are constructed. Unfocused but barely concise, at least until the last act, it’s intentions on starting off hollow and laid back before ballooning and bloating into this wannabe grand epic means stalling whatever momentum it built up to stretch the runtime out to a self-indulgent degree, effectively delaying the punchline until it, itself, becomes the punchline. It constantly picks at its own throat over which tone it wants to establish and there’s no consistent balance found before the credits roll.
Ambition can sometimes be a poison and it’s that very same ambition that stunts Argylle’s growth and bottlenecks the potential it DOES live up to…..in small doses, that is.
