Argh, Guile

Skip Matthew Vaughn's latest spy adventure and watch 'Mr. Right' instead.

There was a time - seems like it wasn’t so long ago - when a new Matthew Vaughn film was cause for excitement.

Vaughn produced Guy Ritchie’s breakthrough films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, before jumping into the director’s chair himself. His first five consecutive films at the helm, made over the course of ten years, are a total blast at their best and still pretty goddamn fun at their worst.

The 2004 gangster thriller Layer Cake is credited with both landing Daniel Craig the James Bond gig and bringing Tom Hardy to the attention of Christopher Nolan. 2007’s Stardust, Vaughn’s first of many collaborations with the writer Jane Goldman, is a noble-but-failed attempt to create something akin to The Princess Bride for a new generation. 2010’s post-modern superhero comedy Kick-Ass is where Vaughn really found his voice as a director; it walks a tonal tightrope between emotional sincerity and outsized stylization that indulges in cartoonishly violent humor and comes right up to the line of being meta (it was originally intended to use pieces of the scores from films like Superman and Batman; the finished product uses thinly-veiled parodies of those scores due to rights issues). Vaughn pushed things even further in that direction with his next film, X-Men: First Class (2011), a superhero movie set against the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis that wholeheartedly embraces the pop sensibilities of the era in which it is set.

Then, in 2014, he made Kingsman: The Secret Service, a movie about class warfare disguised as a James Bondian adventure and the true culmination of all his work up until that point (not for nothing, it also launched the careers of Taron Egerton and Sofia Boutella).

It was also, in hindsight, the hurricane that heaved the S.S. Vaughn off its course and into the Bermuda Triangle.

Vaughn has only directed three films in the ten years since Kingsman: The Secret Service. Two of them, Kingsman: The Golden Cirle (2017) and The King’s Man (2021), are, as their titles suggest, part of the same franchise. But all three of them - including the just-released Argylle - are spy movies, and all three of them are lousy.

I don’t know why, exactly, in a universe of infinite possibilities, Vaughn has become stuck here of all places. And I’m hesitant to say, as some critics have, that he has run out of ideas for this particular type of movie, because I think there are some redeeming qualities to Argylle - flashes of cleverness and creativity that make the movie’s overwhelming shortcomings all the more frustrating. I believe there is 100% a good version of Argylle to be made… this just ain’t it.

Scripted by Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman), Argylle is about a novelist, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who has found success writing a series of espionage novels about a spy named - you guessed it - Argylle (portrayed in fantasy sequences by Henry Cavill, sporting a haircut so heinous I have to assume Matthew Vaughn actually hates him). Elly and her cat, Alfie, are en route to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara) - who also seems to be her editor, maybe? - when she’s inexplicably attacked by real spies, and ultimately saved by a secret agent, Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell), who doesn’t exactly live up to her romanticized expectations. According to Aidan, Elly has turned out to be something of an oracle: everything she’s written in her books has actually come to pass. Consequently, the bad guys believe she’s an actual intelligence operative, and now her life is in danger.

Argylle has a myriad of problems. The CGI is distractingly bad; during action sequences involving Aidan, Elly frequently imagines Argylle doing all the fighting, and the movie keeps cutting back and forth between Henry Cavill and Sam Rockwell in a way that’s repetitive and irritating; and the music, by Lorne Balfe, is simultaneously oppressive, derivative, and bizarrely severe given what’s actually happening on screen, like someone scored a Matt Helm flick with the soundtrack to The Thin Red Line.

But none of those issues are the ones I wanna discuss. Because a) they’ve already been bludgeoned to death by other critics, and b) even though I think they are problems, I do not think they are the problem. Or, put another way: they may have very well be surmountable if not for another, larger defect. And the best way to impart this deficiency without actually giving anything about Argylle away is to remind you that Matthew Vaughn came up with the story for 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand.

Vaughn isn’t credited on the third X-Men film; he worked closely with screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn to develop the story, then quit the movie just weeks before production was set to start. Brett Ratner ultimately came on as director, but he didn’t have any time to redevelop the script; the movie that everyone saw and hated was the same movie that Vaughn had been planning to make. Vaughn has even said as much, while blaming Ratner’s crappy direction on the lackluster final product. And, yeah, a better director would have made a better movie… but I don’t know that Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and David Fincher all working together around the clock could have made a good movie from that script.

The problem with X-Men: The Last Stand is that so much happens so quickly that nothing ever feels believable. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a movie about mutants with superpowers, not The Battle of Algiers. But it still needs to have EMOTIONAL believability. Cyclops is killed but there’s no time to mourn because this guy we never met before doesn’t wanna be a mutant anymore except he changes his mind two seconds later and then also Magneto heartlessly turns his back on his closest ally in a millisecond plus here’s two new characters and oh shit we almost forgot to wrap up these two other storylines from the previous movies and oh look three more important characters are dead now except never mind they’re still alive. Like. JESUS CHRIST. Slow the fuck down and let us digest some of what’s happening. When your story is just EVENT EVENT EVENT EVENTEVENTEVENTEVENTEVENTEVENTEVENTEVENTEVENT!!! all the time with no actual space to absorb what the characters are feeling, the results end up being inadvertently funny at best and numbing at worst.

And THAT is Argylle’s biggest problem, too: the ad campaign has highlighted the fact that this movie has a lot of twists, but, really, it’s almost nothing BUT twists, especially after the first half. This character is good and that character is bad! No, that character is good and this character is bad! No, they’re both bad! No, they’re both good! No, actually, it’s the way it was when we started, except unless maybe it isn’t? I earnestly thought that some point, Alfie the cat would pull a gun and reveal he’s been working for the bad guys the whole time. He is the only major character that remains loyal to one side throughout.

Argylle is so dependent on twists because that’s all it has. A handful of the performers - specifically, Rockwell, O'Hara, and Bryan Cranston, who plays the villain - are all so good they do the most they can with the big ball of nothing Vaughn has given them; the characters themselves are not actually unique or interesting, and none of their relationships are properly developed, all of which means the twists aren’t even that engaging because we do not care if these people live or die. Actually, we’re probably rooting for them to die, so the movie will just end already (it’s 139 minutes, and, no, it absolutely did not need to be that long).

The worst part of all? None of this is actually in service of anything - unlike Kingsman: The Secret Service and Kick-Ass, the story has no larger point that it’s trying to convey. Argylle is the very definition of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Vaughn has made much better movies in the past, and fingers crossed, he will again in the future.

If you’re in the mood for a romantic action-comedy starring Sam Rockwell, you’d do better to skip Argylle and check out 2015’s Mr. Right instead.

Directed by Paco Cabezas (The Umbrella Academy), Mr. Right stars Anna Kendrick as Martha, a young woman in a state of despair after catching her boyfriend cheating on her. She soon has a meet-cute with Francis (Rockwell), and they hit it off immediately; what Martha doesn’t know is that Francis is a former CIA assassin who now works as a “reverse hitman,” whacking the people that hire him because “murder is wrong” - and, oh yeah, he himself is currently evading death at the hands of his former employers. Hilarity, shoot outs, true love, and even a mild stab at spiritual profundity ensue.

As in Argylle, the humor in Mr. Right stems largely from the dissonance between Francis’ casual, laid-back attitude towards very serious matters (e.g., incredible violence). And, as in Argylle, Rockwell provides most of the romance, too, playing something akin to a Manic Pixie Dream Guy, only capable of killing someone with a spoon.

Kendrick, of course, also has charisma to spare, even if Martha isn’t exactly her most challenging role; Cabezas wisely lets the actress run free and be her quirkiest possible self. Ditto the killer supporting cast, which includes Tim Roth, James Ransone, Anson Mount, and RZA.

The best part? Mr. Right it isn’t just a funnier, more exciting, and more charming movie than Argylle - it’s also 45 minutes shorter. Amen.