As an avid reader and an action movie aficionado, I was super excited by the premise of Matthew Vaughn’s newest movie, “Argylle.” The plot follows author Elly Conway as the stories from her spy-thriller series come true. Conway navigates enemies and allies as she becomes embroiled in her own storyline and joins real-life spies to help save the world.
With such a creative story idea and an unbelievably stacked cast, I was sure this movie was bound to be my new favorite. I was wrong.
The opening scene threw me off immediately. Listen, I’m all for some questionable physics, and gravity is optional in most action movies, so the bar is pretty low, but watching a four-wheel Jeep slide Tony Hawk-style down a stair railing took things a little too far. I became terrified that I was in for over two hours of unrealistic action scenes that looked more like the cutscenes of a video game than the scenes of a movie with a $200 million production budget. Throughout the film, there was very poor green screen usage and bad CGI. Conway’s cat was, at times, plain scary, a la baby Renesmee from “Twilight”. Luckily, once the action scenes switched to battles requiring less editing, I had a lot more fun. The parallels drawn between Conway’s book characters and real spies during fight scenes made for an entertaining blending of fiction and reality that was exciting to watch.
In terms of characters, I was thoroughly entertained. An author whose ideal night is listening to the Beatles and talking to her cat was painfully relatable. The electric on-screen chemistry between Bryce Dallas Howard (Elly Conway) and Sam Rockwell (Aiden) made the movie worth watching. Dua Lipa, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, and Henry Cavill played believable book spies, but only had about five cumulative minutes of screen time. Here I feel that “Argylle” was inappropriately advertised; based on the posters and trailers, I had expected much more involvement from these actors. I think the movie would have been much better off if it had not set the expectation of these three being principal parts of the movie, and instead highlighted the connection between Howard and Rockwell.
At the first plot twist, I was underwhelmed- I saw it coming from a mile away. When I let my guard down and resigned myself to the idea of “Argylle” being just another predictable thriller, the plot twisted again. And again and again and again. By the end of the movie, my jaw was glued to the floor and I was halfway to developing an ulcer. Though entertaining, the plot was eventually so convoluted that most of the dialogue was the characters repeating major plot points so as not to lose the audience.
Overall, “Argylle” was an entertaining, but unmemorable, cross between a rom-com and a spy-thriller that was fun to watch, despite poor editing and questionable CGI cats.
