REVIEW:
Argyle is just okay. For Matthew Vaughn, the masterful director behind X-Men First Class, Layer Cake, The Kingsman Movies, and Kick Ass, okay is definitely not good enough. This is by far, Vaughn’s weakest film yet. And maybe that’s because it’s basically a paint by numbers spy movie with loads and loads of twists. Characters flip flop what side they’re on so often that you kind of lose track, or stop caring, or both. It’s no surprise that the first two twists are the best, because they both come before the audience is worn out, on how many times things can change.
The premise here is definitely cool. An author is trying to write the last chapter of her spy book and ends up getting caught up in a spy movie herself. What’s especially interesting about it is that she sees her leading character (Agent Argyle, played by Henry Cavil,) and then she sees the real spy (played by Sam Rockwell,) often doing the exact same thing, only differently. Not as elegantly or easily.
Part of the problem is that the Henry Cavil spy, of her book storyline, is more or less dropped about halfway through the movie. The way they should have done this is to have Cavil in his own fictional storyline and then the real storyline with our lead, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) both running parallel to each other throughout the movie. And what could have been cool would be to see that the story she’s writing gets influenced by the real events that are happening to her. So she’s out on the lamb, in hiding with Aidan Wilde (Rockwell,) and then while holed up in their hotel room, she’s writing the next part of her book. And every night, we see a little more of the Cavil story. In that way, it could have been like Memento meets Adaptation. But we don’t get any of that here. This isn’t a movie about a writer writing a story. Instead, this is just the usual spy movie with very little new to offer.
The action is fine, just like always with Vaughn movies, although this one has nothing that sets it apart from the others. And the humor is also not the finest we’ve seen from Vaughn. The Kingsman movies, for example, definitely have this one beat in terms of both action and humor. For humor, that’s probably in large part due to the fact that this movie is PG-13, whereas the Kingsman movies, Kick Ass, and most things Vaughn has done have been rated R. If something works for the director… if he’s so great at doing his thing, then why try to change it? It would be like Tarantino now trying to make a PG-13 movie. It’s not just the humor that gets hurt by this rating change, but also the action. There’s no denying that the action in both Kingsman and Kick Ass are terrific because they go all out, and use their R rating. With Argyle, there is no such luck. No R means a much tamer tone in terms of both comedy and violence. Add the lame story with far too many twists into the mix and you see why this one doesn’t work.