Movie Review: Argylle

Watching Argylle, the latest action film from director Matthew Vaugh, was an astounding experience because I can’t think of a movie where I could feel and see it getting worse with every passing minute. What starts off as a fun spy romance soon balloons into a film that is so focused on attempting to trick the audience and amaze us with action sequences (it fails on both counts) that it loses everything good about the beginning of the film and ends up being a bloated, CGI-heavy mess.

We are introduced to Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a successful and reclusive author of a book series centered on secret agent Argylle (Henry Cavill). Conway is working on finishing the hotly anticipated fifth book but can’t seem to find an ending. Looking for inspiration, she takes a train to her parents’ house. On the train, she meets Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a man who looks homeless but is really a secret agent there to save Elly from a global spy syndicate because the plots of Elly’s books mirror real-world events. Aidan takes Elly on a globe-trotting adventure to keep her safe and stop the global syndicate from getting the information that it needs.

Argylle started fun and I was having a relatively good time, especially in the first act. The film reminded me of the under-appreciated 2010 action-romance Knight and Day starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. Both films found seemingly normal people (Howard, Diaz) being thrown into a wild situation by a charismatic and wiry spy (Rockwell, Cruise), and through all the action and overly complicated plot we expect from a spy film, we were drawn into the film by the chemistry of the two leads. While not an original idea, a spy film pairing a spy and a seemingly boring and normal person is always a fun recipe for a movie, especially when the two leads have great chemistry like Howard and Rockwell have.

However, quickly into act two, Argylle starts spiraling into a movie that is trying too hard to surprise the audience and entertain us with action sequences and completely forgets what made act one so successful. Characters die and then come back to life in a matter of scenes. Characters we thought were good and on Elly’s side turn out to bad and working for the spy syndicate, a twist that happens an annoying number of times. Shootouts and action scenes that aren’t exciting and go on too long. Howard and Rockwell’s chemistry disappears in this act, and their characters become just human exposition readers to move the scenes forward. Act two ends with a big, ridiculous twist that had me chuckling at its stupidity in the theater. The twist is so cheesy, especially in the way it is delivered, and unnecessary. It’s one of those twists that is more of a detriment to the film and makes it worse than better.

Act three was the nail in the coffin for Argylle as the film became a bloated mess of CGI-heavy action scenes, continued uninspired twists to try and surprise the audience, and a failed attempt to rekindle any sort of magic Howard and Rockwell had in the first act. There are two major set pieces in this act of the film. One of them is a shootout featuring several brightly colored smoke bombs, which, while colorful, is dreadfully constructed and boring. The other one finds Elly using knives as figure skates to skate on oil-covered ground. I appreciate the silliness of the scene, but the scene is simply one of the ugliest action scenes I have seen in recent years and the CGI on Howard was so bad, that early ’90s 3D animation was better. But Vaughn couldn’t leave the third act without giving us one more big, stupid twist that might have been the most predictable one in a movie loaded with predictable twists. It was painful sitting through the third act and had me questioning why I was still in my chair.

And just when I thought it was over, Vaughn dropped a mid-credit scene that genuinely brought the star grade of the film down an additional half-star. Usually, mid-credit scenes are supposed to draw excitement for what is to come or are a little callback to something that happened earlier in the film. This caused groans not only from me but others in my theater. I genuinely hated this scene and while I did not like the movie at this point, this brought it down to the worst movie of the early 2024 year.

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