The overcooked action flick “Argylle” begins with what seems to be a joke. Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) is tailing a Greek LaGrange (Dua Lipa) who is clad in a glittery gold dress at some undercover setting. Her carefree solo before that malodorous dance was followed by her foes showering her with bullets. A chase set-piece straight from 007 has Argylle in pursuit of LaGrange as his team (tech wiz Ariana DeBose and sidekick John Cena) assists in the escape. They crack company beats along the way only for LaGrange to sober them with “You and I are not so different,” and Argyle’s subtler twist “You’re a terrorist” seems equally predictive. “It seems we serve the same master.” Meant to be taken at face value, these lines furnish your fit of laughter. The foreign feel to the characters is crafted by novelist Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) at the broken pen stage for her fifth entry of an Argylle series.
The stepdaughter of Fox co-founder also plays Chico, so needless to say he does not miss a beat as the narration elaborates around folding the humour in. After hitting a block, Elly Kova boards a train headed to her mother’s place with her cat Alfie in tow. Onboard, she comes across Aidan (Sam Rockwell). The scraggy stranger is not the dashing Argyle rather, he is the stylish version that melts into the crowd and is easy to ignore.
Elly’s POV shots give a nifty editing technique, as one blink morphs Rockwell’s face into Cavill’s, which combines fantasy and reality. Aiden is here to extract the anxious spy novelist. Assassins tasked by the Division, an undercover agency headed by Director Ritter (Bryan Cranston), believe she has information regarding a flash drive containing sensitive information. What makes her a persona non grata? What Elly does not know is that the covers of her novels correspond to real missions in such a way that suggests she may be a spy. For a short time, Sam and Elly as they hover around the drive work is fine. The film is loose and relaxed in the way it ridicules, “The National Treasure”, “The Lost City,” The Long Kiss Goodnight, ”The Bourne films and Vaughn’s own Kingsman series. But ‘Argylle’ skips the punch line in an effort to become an archetypal spy movie. It fails in trying to rehash the better films. Great actors like Samuel L Jackson, Richard E. Grant and DeBose fall victim to a mindless script that gives them no lines worth performing.
The lighting is flat, but the action is jagged with chopped-up editing that is artificially enhanced by three over-the-top plays of a Beatles song that was thought lost, “Now and Then.” I hate to say the needle drop is a cheap gimmick, especially considering that it probably cost an insane amount of money. I can’t help but feel that bringing John Lennon’s voice back just to immediately slap it onto a mindless action film does feel a tad ghoulish.
Even if “Argylle” is not without some enjoyment. O’Hara has fun and does her best impression of Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution. Cranston also adds funny touches to what is otherwise a very bland role. Scenes with Alfie the cat are potentially adorable, but the CGI does not help. It is ironic, though, that in a movie started by Elly writing a terrible final chapter, Vaughn seems to be lost when it comes to figuring out how to end it.
But let’s just say that all of the Vaughn tries to explain, the less fun this becomes (the more jarring his attempt at alternating between colour photography and black and white still images adds to the problem). For a time, A Zany Rockwell is playing his most captivating character in years until the film requires him to morph into a romantic lead, which he somehow manages to do. With the crystallization of Elly’s backstory, Howard’s performance, somehow informs my perception of him as lacking in force. These two seem stuck in a narrative whirlpool, unable to chart a path that reconciles the newfound sobriety of “Argylle” with the lightheartedness of its earlier parts. It all leads into a grand operatic, quirky and, in principle, set-piece action tableau whose centrepiece is an achingly dreary hallway where Vaughn indulges in the worst action scene I have ever seen. Vaughn does not comprehend how a body moves through space, and so cranking up his already painful penchant for distorting fight sequences into utterly contorted shapes of over-exaggerated plastic to an unsustainable level digs deep.
It’s regrettable. “Argylle” had every chance of being a viciously witty satire. Sadly, it appears to be exhausted from having to play the punchline of the terrible joke for far too long. Yet, in seeking to avoid becoming a taunt endeavouring to tie these films to the Kingsman series Vaughn adds absented identity to his film for which he will be forever forgotten.
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