There’s no better example in Hollywood of someone riding the wave of one film’s success than Matthew Vaughn.

2014 saw the film Kingsman: The Secret Service become a major success and over the last 10 years, Matthew Vaughn has been working on…Kingsman movies. Over the last decade, Vaughn has attempted to recreate the success of the first Kingsman movie with multiple sequels, spin-offs, and prequels.  There’s a reason why they say lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice and trying to do so is an unfruitful endeavor.

With every Kingsman sequel being less successful than the last, Vaughn’s last hope of getting people to buy the Kingsman hype is directing yet another spy action thriller this time led by Henry Cavill, at least that’s what Universal Pictures wants you to believe.

The latest film from Universal Pictures entitled ‘Argylle’, features several big names hoping to get movie-going audiences interested in a spy franchise not named Mission Impossible. The setup of this film begins with a fiction writer named Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard). Conway is working on the latest book of her successful series Argylle, a story about a spy trying to acquire information about the shadow organization that is trying to burn him.

Suffering from writer’s block, Elly decides to take a train back home to clear her head when she is ambushed by an actual spy, Aidan (Sam Rockwell) who explains to her novels have predicted their future. So much so that a covert operation known as ‘Division’ wants Elly dead as her latest book threatened to expose them to the public.

Elly and Aiden must work together to figure out why Elly has access to classified information despite having never been an actual spy.

Before I bury this movie let’s go ahead and get some of the positives out of the way.  Argylle is a good movie buried inside a really stupid movie.  The opening act in this film creates a very interesting setup of a story within a story. The film introduces the spy duo of Henry Cavill and John Cena playing espionage in a fictional story that Elly is trying to present. Early on the film gives you the impression that we will be seeing two stories flipping between fiction and nonfiction.

Believe it or not, there’s a real-life mystery regarding the actual identity of one writer Elly Conway as media Outlets could not verify her existence. These conspiracy theories got to the point where many people believe that the books were written by singer Taylor Swift. What this means is that both the conspiracy theory and the fictional story about this film are far more entertaining than the movie itself. 

Audiences will spend the first 40 minutes watching the tease of a much better movie. That all goes away the second audience realizes to film that they’re getting is different than the film that they want. 

The first sign that this film is going to end an epic disaster is this baffling decision to make this a 2-hour and 20-minute movie. Matthew Vaughn is notorious for his run times that tease the 3-hour mark. Argylle is no different as this film makes you commit to the Long Haul and halfway in you are guaranteed to feel every bit of the journey.  just like any other mystery film,  this is a film that lives or dies on the twist, and once the twist of this movie is revealed this film dies a horrific death.

Not only is the twist of this film stupid but the film gets progressively dumber as the film goes on.  Argylle asks you to buy into a shady promise from a snake oil salesman and then somehow be surprised by the inevitable result. The film goes from being entertaining to being so cartoonish it can’t be taken seriously. Bryce Dallas Howard is an absolute miscast for the role that she is given in this film, especially because this movie was given a 200 million dollar production budget under the belief that it could profit a franchise that would create at least three more films moving forward. Even if you accept the premise that is given, you can see an actress like Karen Gillan being a much better fit for the role.

It doesn’t help you from believing that at its core this film is a glorified fan fiction masquerading as a multi-million dollar big-budget movie. 

Argylle is yet the latest example of Hollywood’s bait-and-switch marketing which tricks you into thinking that you’re going to be watching an entertaining spy movie with big-name faces such as Henry Cavill John Cena Samuel Jackson and more instead what audiences receive is a movie that can go down as one of the dumbest films to be released in the year.

When it’s all said and done Argylle is a film that’s overproduced with a bunch of big names that can’t help the script create a coherent story. 

1/5

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