REVIEW: Argylle [2024]

Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 139 minutes
Release Date: February 2nd, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Universal Pictures / Apple Studios
Director(s): Matthew Vaughn
Writer(s): Jason Fuchs

Regret for time wasted is wasting more time.

While Argylle might be the dumbest of Matthew Vaughn’s films, it still remains a lot of fun—something I cannot say for Kingsman: The Golden Circle (I didn’t even bother with The King’s Man). The cast is game, the music is good, and the action toes that line between exciting and farcical to keep the audience engaged even if the motives and plot are as simple as simple can be.

Because while the premise is great (Jason Fuchs’ creates a writer who writes her spy novels so well that real spies want to use her to help them solve a mystery eerily similar to her fiction), the almost two-and-a-half-hour runtime is mostly gags and redundancies attempting to trick us into thinking there’s more than meets the eye. The MacGuffin isn’t even nuclear codes or an apocalyptic virus. It’s just a dossier of the bad guys because the good guys won’t believe they exist without one. (So, just make one yourself since you already know all the information it contains?)

I really liked the first fight scene with Bryce Dallas Howard’s Elly constantly blinking between Henry Cavill’s Argylle dispatching villains with a calm smile and Sam Rockwell’s Wilde doing so with much less grace. Howard and Rockwell’s rapport is fun (every iteration since they shift between allies and enemies multiple times) and the driving force for the entire film considering the spy stuff is so one-dimensional beyond it’s not so twisty twists.

The supporting cast is great too whether large roles (Catherine O’Hara and Bryan Cranston) or small (John Cena and Samuel L. Jackson), but the special effects leave a lot to be desired. The climactic Snow Patrol battle (“Run” as sung by Leona Lewis) is laughably bad—and not because of the over-the-top dance choreography. The whole thing is shrouded in colored smoke created by awful CGI both in its visual authenticity and ability to interact with the actors. Thankfully an oil spill scene proves a tad better even if its ice-skating finale is a literal cartoon.

As for the final shot and that mid-credits sequence? Absurdly silly both in content and the intent to lazily retrofit this movie into a completely different franchise. I cannot tell if it’s meant as a joke or truly a tease for more.