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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 2/22/2025

Argylle by Matthew Vaughn

I don't often talk about singular movies, especially modern singular movies, but I recently caught the Matthew Vaughn directed, Bryce Dallas Howard bomb, Argylle, when I got a 3 month free trial for AppleTV+ (purely for Severance, by the way). I've liked Matthew Vaughn as a filmmaker since his first film, Layer Cake through all three of his Kingsman films and even stuff like Stardust. So, I was actually somewhat excited about Argylle. It looked like what had become pretty standard Vaughn output by the trailers, and I didn't think that was a bad thing. I liked pretty standard Vaughn output.

And then it was released into theaters for roughly one showing on one weekend where it bombed horribly and then went behind the AppleTV+ paywall never to emerge again. It was also battered around mercilessly by critics (33% on Rotten Tomatoes with negative reviews getting titles like "Argylle" (hopefully) signals the collapse of the modern blockbuster) and handled roughly by audiences (5.6/10 on the IMDb). It's surely not worthwhile, it seems.

Well, I watched it anyway because you're not my supervisor.

And...I thought it was alright. It's not good. It's silly and ridiculous, much like several of Vaughn's other films, but it's also overlong and overcomplicated (um...also like several of Vaughn's other films). The combination simply doesn't work as well here. However, in terms of mediocre action spectacles, is this really any worse than most of what gets released these days? Is it worth special scorn? Well, the general reaction contrasted with my own ignited a couple of lines of thought in my brain, and I decided that instead of simply reviewing the film, my thoughts were taking me in an essay-like direction.

Essentially, it amounts to Argylle's place in this little slice of movie history we're living through.

Oh, and I should note that I'm going to spoil the crap out of this movie. If you're really jonesing to see Argylle without spoiling, skip. But, it's not like it's hard to predict.

Marketing

The biggest hit against the film, if I'm to believe to the reviews, was the prominence of Henry Cavill in the marketing. I mean, look at that image above, straight from the poster. Cavill is front and center. The story of the film, as told by the trailers, is Howard's Ellie Conway is the writer of a series of spy novels about Agent Argylle (Cavill). The trailers spend a lot of time showing Cavill, implying that he's in most of the film. He's not. He's prominently in the beginning, intermittently in the first action scene, and then occasionally in a few shots throughout. Most of what he's in is in the trailer. The actual star of the movie? She's two faces down the left from Cavill at the center. Heck, not even once does Cavill hold that cat in the movie.

Why sell the movie that way? Well, because the marketing team was trying to sell to men, I think. The problem is that the film is actually a romantic comedy. Think a combination of a Jason Bourne movie, a Roger Moore era Bond movie, Spy, and Romancing the Stone, with heavy emphasis on the last one. It's a meet cute between Ellie and the secret agent played by Sam Rockwell, Aidan. They meet on the train, he saves her from bad guys, they bicker back and forth until they fall in love (again). They do that through a globe-trotting spy-adventure that takes them from Wyoming to London to Arabia to an oil tanker.

The film is quite focused on this relationship between the two from the time Aidan is introduced until the end. The fans of Vaughn's previous spy romps like Kingsman were not planning on getting on board with a romantic comedy, I don't think. And women tend to like action films far less than men. There are definitely female action fans out there, but from a population perspective, it's men who drive the business to action films much more than women. So, getting men to see an action film that's actually more geared towards women was going to hurt the film no matter what. They were the wrong audience. Never mind that the audience for female-driven action movies probably isn't big enough to justify spending between $200 and $250 million on one, but getting the wrong audience into the door first is going to sour the pot.

Spy Spoof


As a comparison for myself, while writing this, I watched the Melissa McCarthy film Spy and the Steve Carrel movie Get Smart, based on the show (which I've never seen). I was mostly curious at the treatment of characters who one wouldn't think to be spies getting in on the action. I was mostly curious of this because of Bryce Dallas Howard's casting in Argylle.

Howard is a middle-aged woman with two children, and she has the kind of body that one would equate with that. She's not built physically, in any traditional way, for an action heavy role, and when her character of Elly is revealed to be the inspiration for Argylle, an agent named Rachel Kylle, it should be a source of comedy because the film has established that she doesn't fit. Now, I set out to watch Spy and Get Smart as comparisons because they both revolve around central characters caught up in spy adventures that you wouldn't expect. There are a lot of jokes around the unsuitability of each character for the job (Spy pulls its punches a bit, but Get Smart is a bit merciless, probably because Spy is about a woman and Get Smart is about a man). However, Argylle never, not once does this.

The thing about Howard's casting is that it should actually be one of the best parts of the film. She looks much more like the writer than the agent, so the misdirection in the first half before the reveal is more convincingly sold. However, there's never any reference to the fact that she's not a conventional heroine for a spy-action movie. Instead, she's just treated like she's Ana da Armas or something.

This isn't some sort of deal breaker for the film, but it just ends up feeling like a lot of humor got left on the table in the film's final act. And that final act is where the real gold is anyway, but I'll get to that.

The film is otherwise filled with convention of spy movies with an amnesiac central character. Mysterious guy who may be trustworthy. A series of clues to follow towards a larger goal. An evil organization that needs to be taken down. A series of action scenes. It doesn't break any molds, but it's amusing.

Where it got a lot of negative attention was the sheer number of twists and turns that seemingly happen every ten minutes. It's not an invalid critique. They get tiresome and predictable after a certain point. It's part of the overall effort in movies like these to create unpredictability because people like these sorts of mechanical surprises that they can't see coming. It almost makes me think it was an intentional decision to just overplay the convention in a film that's all about being big and extreme, as is Vaughn's wont. Excess is the name of the game.

Vaughn-like Action


As I started with, I'm a fan of Vaughn in general. A lot of that centers around the anarchic approach to action. The common centerpiece people point to is the faux-one-camera shootout in the first Kingsman movie, but his movies ever since have been chock full of stuff like that. And it gets me every time. Argylle is no different.

Although, the overall package is more sedate than I would have expected. It takes a while to get that energy going, more than his previous films.

But, anyway, the action is ridiculous. Think of Elton John in a flowery feather outfit drop-kicking a goon at the end of Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Here there's extended bits of Elly trying to build up to crushing a bad guy's skull. There's the fight across the train where Sam Rockwell's character keeps getting switched with Henry Cavill's Argylle when Elly blinks. There's the escape from a weapons' locker where Elly and Rockwell's character rekindle their love through shooting bad guys and letting off smoke bombs that make heart shapes. It's ridiculous, in service to its romantic comedy core, and I love it.

The most ridiculous is when an oil slick develops on the lower deck of a ship, Elly shoves knives on the bottom of her boots, and then she ice-skates (oil-skates?) around killing people first with knives and then with guns. It's stupid. It's ridiculous. I found it immensely entertaining. And at the end of it...Elly's yellow dress has not one drop of black oil on it. She just has a small oil streak on the side of her face.

Is this realistic? No. Is it supposed to be? Not at all.

I'm beginning to see why people reacted so poorly to this film, to be honest. They need strict realism from their movies about supermen defeating armies by themselves. Silliness and unrealism are not allowed.

Its Place in History


Oh, don't get me wrong. This is never going to get a serious re-evaluation. This is never going to get a chapter in a book about movies in the early 21st Century. It won't even manage a footnote in a paper about AppleTV+.

However, it does seem to hold a certain representative element to parts of major trends in Hollywood right now. From the highest of levels, this is Apple trying to create a new franchise (so much sequel bait by the end) with the interesting twist that it's an original idea headed by a singular filmmaker. I don't really like the term auteur (I see it used more for gatekeeping purposes than actual dialogue), but Vaughn is distinctive when it comes to the modern landscape of action filmmakers. His action scenes are actually pretty one-of-a-kind with their embrace of the ridiculous and excess from concept through execution.

There's also this big sense that money is just being thrown around needlessly. The crux of that is the cat, Alfie, who is, as far as I can tell, 100% computer generated 100% of the time. That cat probably cost the production 7 figures alone in the budget, and it's obviously computer generated in shots where it's just being petted on a table. The whole movie has this glossy, CGI-feel to it that could have been undone with more real things in camera than fake things added in post, but the cat is just the centerpiece to it all.

It also reflects the self-perceived needs of appealing to women in the action-movie space. It's another female-led action movie, this time with a woman at the center who "looks like the audience" in not being a model of some kind, and it did poorly at the box office (less than $100 million worldwide).

So, I liked it. I think it's Vaughn's least film. I sort of get why audiences rejected it. The marketing was off. The target demo isn't that interested in action films. The actual target demo of action films could see that it shared major elements with modern action films that had grown stale to them. It's also emblematic of modern major trends in corporate filmmaking.

So...is this a plea to get people to watch it? Not really, more like a discussion jumping off point about the modern state of filmmaking with the film Argylle as a starting line.

If you have seen it, did you hate it like...seemingly the rest of the world?

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

The Monkey

Cleaner

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Sorority Girl (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "So, another middling overall effort that could have been more had Corman allowed more time to further address issues with the script." [Plex]

The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "There are a couple of decent performances from Devon and Cabot, but they're very much in the background for most of the film. I didn't hate it, but this film ain't good." [YouTube]

War of the Satellites (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I surprisingly enjoyed this film a good bit. It's still silly with holes, but it functions well enough and entertained me throughout. Really, Corman's best film so far." [YouTube]

Machine-Gun Kelly (Rating 3/4) Full Review "This is probably Corman's most serious and accomplished work to date. It's still a bit messy, needing another rewrite and more time to fill out side characters, but the core is solid, helped in no small part by a pair of accomplished central performances from Cabot and Bronson." [Prime]

She Gods of Shark Reef (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "So, it's a wet squib of a film. Characters are too thin. Actors are too bland. Situations are too rote." [Prime]

A Bucket of Blood (Rating 3/4) Full Review "This brisk 62-minute long film was Corman essentially just goofing around with his friends and a small amount of cash, and it revealed where Corman's strengths lied. It wasn't in traditional storytelling or modes of production, but in working on the edges of the film industry to just...see what he could do." [Prime]

House of Usher (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Really, this is fun, Corman using his skills and crew in its most effective way possible. This is just quality entertainment." [YouTube]

The Little Shop of Horrors (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's not a long, deep, or challenging film. It's light fun that's over pretty quickly, understands its assignment and accomplishes it well. The unevenness of the comedy hurts it slightly, but it's mostly a breeze of a fun time." [Prime]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 3/15, and it will be about the directing career of Sergei Eisenstein.