Argylle (REVIEW) | Projector | It's Kingsman light
[Ad - Sponsored by Entertainment Earth] Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell and Henry Cavill headline Matthew Vaughn's spy action-comedy, but is a big twist really enough to separate this from Vaughn's Kingsman? Nope, not really.
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00:00 This video is sponsored by Entertainment Earth.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode, novelist Bryce Dallas Howard discovers that a spy stories are coming true in Matthew Vaughn's Argyle.
00:11 [music]
00:27 Ellie Conway played by Bryce Dallas Howard is the successful author of the Argyle series of books,
00:32 where the title character is a handsome, glow-trotting super spy played by Henry Cavill.
00:37 As she prepares to face the fifth book, Ellie takes the train to see her mother Ruth, played by Katherine O'Hara,
00:41 when a man named Aiden, played by Sam Rockwell, reveals that he's a real spy and rescues her from assassins.
00:48 Ellie discovers that Argyle books have been coming true, and the real-life version of the Division that her fictional hero has been fighting against,
00:55 led by Bryan Cranston's Ritter, are determined to find out what happens next and get ahead of the story before Ellie writes about it.
01:02 Argyle is the latest from Matthew Vaughn, best known for the Kingsman and Kick-Ass series of films,
01:07 and this is very much intended to launch a new franchise.
01:10 And Vaughn has gone a bit meta with it, turning it into a cross-media franchise.
01:15 When the film was originally announced, it was alleged that it was based on a book written by Ellie Conway.
01:20 When reporters try to figure out who Conway was, they obviously struggle, because as it turns out,
01:25 Conway is the fictional main character of this movie, which was only revealed when the trailer dropped last year.
01:31 But coinciding with the film, there is actually a tie-in book allegedly written by Ellie Conway,
01:38 and they're two pieces of the same universe.
01:41 And so many people have been trying to work out, "Who wrote this novel? Who is this a pseudonym for?"
01:47 because obviously it's a ghostwriter of some kind, and this spiralled into the absolutely bizarre theory
01:54 that has had to been debunked in multiple press interviews about the film,
01:58 that it was allegedly written by Taylor Swift.
02:01 Because cats. Yeah, I don't know. Taylor Swift does some very weird things to people.
02:06 The film itself, though, is written by Jason Fuchs, best known for Pan and Wonder Woman,
02:11 and I don't know who the Conway of the novel is. Maybe it's a pseudonym for Vaughn himself.
02:17 Really, though, the big question regarding Argyle is that given that Vaughn is so associated with Kingsman,
02:23 having made three movies at this point, whether or not it can differentiate itself enough from his established franchise
02:31 to feel fresh and new. And unfortunately, this Apple TV production mostly feels like Kingsman Lite.
02:38 Even the marketing has been doing a bit of trickery, promoting this as a Henry Cavill vehicle,
02:42 and putting his scenes front and center in the trailers and TV spots,
02:47 which is understandable because he is playing the title character,
02:50 albeit one that is actually a character within a book in the film.
02:55 And so that means that in reality, Cavill is a supporting player.
02:59 I think that's pretty obvious when you're really watching the trailer closely,
03:03 but also the fact that they've accelerated his billing.
03:06 In many of the promo materials, Cavill is given top billing, but in the actual film, he's billed fifth,
03:13 which shows just how prominent he really is as a character, which is to say, not actually all that much.
03:20 The opening sequence of the movie is where many of those clips come from, and it is actually quite fun.
03:26 The casting of Cavill is a very canny one because obviously it's a nod to the fact that he was considered genuinely
03:33 to be James Bond at one point. It was very close between him and Daniel Craig, as I understand it.
03:40 So Cavill has very much carried those James Bond rumors through much of his career.
03:46 In fact, there's still people that are saying that he might be the next James Bond.
03:50 Cavill is clearly kind of poking a bit of fun at that in the fact that he is playing a very, very over-the-top version
03:59 of James Bond, right down to the visual appearance, where he's not just square-jawed as he usually is,
04:05 he's also square-hair-cutted as well. He's got this kind of almost Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV kind of haircut about him.
04:13 But he's so slick and so self-assured that it just comes across as absolute parody.
04:20 And this continues as Argyle chases femme fatale Dua Lipa through Greece, smashing his car through multiple buildings
04:26 in the process, in a very digital recreation of the opening to Police story.
04:32 There's a very knowingly OTT and excessive action set piece. It sets the tone with a wink.
04:39 The big risk with this gambit, though, is that when you reveal what the movie actually is,
04:44 you don't want to disappoint the audience that genuinely wanted to watch the movie you were setting up the first time.
04:51 And in this case, I genuinely would have watched an entire movie of Henry Cavill and John Cena
04:57 teamed up together as super spies, taking on an organisation. That sounds like that would have been a really fun movie,
05:04 but Argyle is not that. And Cavill and Cena do pop up later in the movie. We see more scenes from Conway's book,
05:14 but also Conway imagines Aiden as Argyle at several points through the movie.
05:20 So Cavill does keep popping up through the film, but really it's Bryce Dallas Howard's movie and Sam Rockwell's.
05:27 It's not Henry Cavill's, unfortunately. And I think this actually backfires on the movie to a certain extent,
05:35 not just because it will disappoint those that have been led in by the marketing, but genuinely because I think
05:40 it's actually squandering some pretty good casting. Cavill is clearly having fun with the role,
05:47 but also by stunt casting him alongside Dua Lipa and Cena, what they end up doing is hardly using them in the movie.
05:55 This becomes a recurring pattern in Argyle. They keep stunt casting performers and then giving them roles
06:02 where they barely get anything to do in them. Cena in particular seems to be constantly running into this.
06:09 He just pops up in loads and loads of different movies and then he's only in them for about two minutes.
06:13 And Argyle is the latest example of this. And Cena has a lot of charisma. I think he could carry a movie like this.
06:21 There is a part of me that genuinely was a little bit disappointed when Argyle reveals itself to more be in the style
06:28 of something like Romancing the Stone. And that's not to say that I'm not partial to a riff on that formula.
06:33 In fact, we've had a very successful one quite recently with The Lost City, where again, a writer discovers that
06:39 what she's been putting in her novels is closer to the truth than she could have possibly imagined,
06:43 and then finds herself in that very same adventure. That is what Argyle is ultimately.
06:49 But the thing is, it's also quite familiar. We've seen a lot of variations on that kind of story,
06:56 and putting a spy spin on it doesn't quite make it feel as fresh as it could possibly be.
07:02 And while the Cavill and Cena version of the movie might be even closer to Kingsman,
07:07 there is a lot of the DNA here, because Vaughn brings his usual style to the proceedings.
07:13 I think that Argyle is at its most successful when it is trying to be Romancing the Stone.
07:19 That portion of the movie is by far its strongest, mostly because it's a succession of chase sequences,
07:25 and clearly has a strong sense of where it wants to go, particularly in that train sequence,
07:31 which is very well handled. The fight scene on the train, yes, it does suffer from the fact
07:37 that it is a PG-13 movie, and so Vaughn is clearly pulling back.
07:42 The Kingsman fight scenes were quite crunchy and bloody a lot of the time.
07:46 There was some quite memorable bits of OTT gore in them. You can't do that in a movie like this.
07:53 So mostly, it's generic pow-pow-pew-pew kind of fight scenes, but actually, Vaughn still knows
08:00 how to carry an action set piece, even if they are noticeably softened from its sister franchise.
08:06 But Argyle is a lot softer than Kingsman in other ways as well, because it's harkening closer to a rom-com formula.
08:12 The Kingsman films were very much boys' own adventures with a kind of leery, ladsy sense of humour.
08:18 It was deliberately edgy and provocative, and at times, it did overset the mark.
08:23 You think of the final scene from The Secret Service, or the infamous bit from The Golden Circle,
08:28 where a woman gets a tracking device inserted up her nether regions. There's none of that in Argyle, thankfully.
08:35 The edge has almost been completely filed off here, for better and for worse,
08:41 because at least it doesn't have the very worst excesses of Kingsman in it.
08:47 But there are points in Argyle where you wish it was just that little bit rougher, just that little bit meaner.
08:52 And it feels like Vaughn is trying to create a very mainstream action movie that appeals to the masses,
08:59 more so than Kingsman, in that it has a very hard R rating.
09:03 So that means that a lot of the movie largely resides on the charm of Bryce S. Howard and Sam Rockwell to carry it.
09:11 And luckily, these are two actors with a lot of charm to spare.
09:15 Rockwell, in particular, who steals a lot of this movie as Aiden.
09:20 Rockwell isn't really doing anything that you would not associate with him usually,
09:25 but I think that his persona, which is very kind of ironic and detached and laid-back,
09:31 is a very different take than what we usually see with a spy.
09:35 Very much by design, the casting of Rockwell is deliberately a subversion to that kind of James Bond formula
09:43 that Cavill has got turned up to 110%.
09:47 So by putting him back and forth with Cavill early on on the train,
09:51 you really get to see the difference and see how he portrays it in a bit more of a kind of laconic way,
09:58 and gives a little bit of a kind of knowing sense of humor to the proceedings.
10:02 While Bryce Dallas Howard is very good at navigating her way through a lot of the chase sequences
10:08 that her character has to kind of bumble her way through.
10:11 Her character is riddled with anxiety that are only exacerbated by the fact that people are trying to kill her the entire time.
10:18 And a lot of the comedy is Rockwell trying to push past Howard's anxieties
10:22 and get her to realize that she's more competent than she allows herself to be,
10:25 even if she watches the mounting body count with horror.
10:29 And you would think that Rockwell and Howard wouldn't actually work together
10:33 because they're not a traditional pairing, but actually they do have very good chemistry,
10:38 and that carries a great chunk of the middle act of Argyle.
10:43 But if there is a problem with Argyle, it's tone.
10:46 Vaughn has said that he wanted the film to be a spy spoof,
10:49 which technically he was already doing with the Kingsman movies.
10:52 So Argyle needs to be bigger and broader. He needs to really push that.
10:58 And he's doing it in the opening with Cena and Cavill,
11:01 but he doesn't keep the energy up when it reverts to Howard and Rockwell.
11:06 You need to really push the comedy in this movie,
11:09 the absurdity of the situations that they found themselves in,
11:12 but also the kind of disrepancy between the spy world that Ellie writes about and reality.
11:18 You could have mined that more for humor,
11:21 but unfortunately Vaughn struggles with a problem that he's also facing in the Kingsman movies,
11:27 where sometimes it feels like he's not sure how serious he wants the audience to take a moment.
11:33 Argyle especially suffers from this because it's just not funny enough.
11:38 If you want to make a spoof, make an outright spoof.
11:42 And I don't feel like Vaughn commits to that.
11:44 Too often the movie really presses upon the cat that Ellie has in her backpack.
11:50 Very often conspicuously CGI'd to get laughs that the writing itself simply isn't getting.
11:57 It's around the halfway point where Argyle drops its big twist,
12:00 and that's the point where it really starts to suffer.
12:04 After that point, there's a lot of time spent on lengthy expository dialogue scenes
12:09 that try to explain to the audience what's going on and why it's happening.
12:14 And you know what really kills comedy fast? Long talky dialogue scenes.
12:20 And the movie compounds this error even further because it drops more twists on top of its twist.
12:26 Sometimes it drops a twist and then untwists it in the very next scene,
12:31 and this requires more dialogue to try and straighten out what's happening.
12:34 And I think what's attempted to be done here is that they're trying to drop so many twists
12:39 that it boomerangs back around to being funny, to being absurdist in just how many rug pulls there are.
12:47 Instead, it just becomes irritating and overly convoluted.
12:51 And Argyle isn't actually all that complicated as a story, even with the twist in the middle of it.
12:59 It's just all this stuff cluttering up the movie and unnecessarily lengthening it as well
13:04 because so many of these scenes go on for such a long time when really it is killing the pacing.
13:12 It's not helped by the fact that Argyle was a COVID shoot in 2021,
13:18 and that is really obvious in the back half of the movie especially
13:22 because it really feels bare a lot of the time.
13:25 You have the main core cast members and virtually nobody else.
13:31 They'll be walking around almost entirely empty locations.
13:34 These long dialogue scenes take place almost exclusively in empty rooms.
13:40 There are obviously sets and sound stages a lot of the time.
13:43 Even the glow trussing feels very CG.
13:46 There's a lot of conspicuous placed backgrounds behind the actors
13:51 that suggest that they probably weren't actually shooting on location a lot of the time,
13:55 so it feels very claustrophobic, especially in the second half of the movie.
13:59 Speaking of that cast, I don't think they're all very well utilised.
14:03 I've already mentioned the stunt casting,
14:06 but also you've got Bryan Cranston as a fairly generic bad guy
14:10 whose maybe one standout scene in the movie is the only time his character leaves his evil hideout.
14:16 There is some pleasure in seeing some of the cast members eventually play against typers.
14:21 More twists are revealed, but you've also got other cast members that are just totally wasted,
14:28 particularly Kingsman stars Sophia Boutella and Samuel L. Jackson.
14:32 Boutella shows up and she literally is in the movie for maybe about five minutes,
14:37 delivers an expository speech, and then wanders off, never to be seen again.
14:42 Remember how memorable she was in the first Kingsman movie,
14:44 how such a standout she was in that film?
14:48 In this, she does virtually nothing.
14:50 She's not in any action scenes whatsoever.
14:53 Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson is also similarly only in one location the entire movie,
14:59 and the climax often cross-cuts to Jackson's character, Sazh Desk, watching a basketball game.
15:06 Wow, one exciting role for the former Kingsman star to play!
15:11 What Vaughn seems to have lost since Kingsman is restraint.
15:14 He keeps trying to do more and bigger, and it's just making his movies bloated and overlong.
15:19 And at 139 minutes, Argyle is very symptomatic of this,
15:22 when it needs to be roughly around two hours at best, and is desperately in need of a prune.
15:28 You really start to feel the length in the second half,
15:31 especially in a long 40-minute stretch where there are no action sequences.
15:35 Instead, Vaughn places them near the end of the film, back-to-back with each other.
15:40 And Vaughn has always showed a flair for action.
15:43 They're often very highly stylized, almost cartoonish.
15:48 And I think the Corridor shootout is a great example of this.
15:52 The huge, colorful plumes of smoke.
15:54 It's a very visually striking sequence.
15:57 Unfortunately, Vaughn follows that with the worst action sequence in the entire movie,
16:02 involving skating on oil.
16:04 Like a lot of blockbusters recently, Argyle features some well-below-part CGI,
16:10 from poor compositing to unusually bad face replacements for stunt doubles.
16:14 That was used quite a bit in the Kingsman movies, and well done.
16:18 But here, they try to do it at several points,
16:21 and they just put the actors' faces on stunt doubles where their hair doesn't match.
16:25 So it makes for a very weird experience,
16:27 especially Sam Rockwell in the film's final action sequence.
16:31 But that oil skating scene is going to very quickly become notorious.
16:36 It's an example of a bad idea.
16:39 It's just too silly to work.
16:41 And then it's executed even worse,
16:44 because the whole time, it looks like they're on a green screen.
16:48 It's cartoony, but not in a good way.
16:51 And I know it's meant to be a comedy scene.
16:53 I know we're meant to be laughing, but we're laughing at it, not with it.
16:58 It's a step too far, both tonally,
17:02 and in terms of what the effects are trying to execute.
17:05 And with regards to the film's big twist,
17:07 while I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag here,
17:09 it becomes very obvious that Matthew Vaughn is a big fan of a certain mid-90s action movie.
17:15 And that's fine. I'm a big fan of that movie, too.
17:18 I think it's one of the most underrated films of its era,
17:21 even though it has developed quite a sizable cult following.
17:24 And Vaughn adds quite a number of homages and references to that inspiration,
17:30 both visually, but also in terms of specific points,
17:33 like the aforementioned skating.
17:36 But if you are going to invoke that movie,
17:39 then you've got to be as fun and as entertaining as it,
17:42 especially because that film does have quite a sizable edge.
17:46 That's what should be in Argyle.
17:49 Unfortunately, it just doesn't match it,
17:52 and ends up being inferior in the comparison.
17:56 Argyle is a mess, but I won't deny that I did have fun with it at points,
18:00 largely because of the sheer strength of its massive cast,
18:02 many of whom are highly watchable performers,
18:04 even if the film doesn't utilise them very well.
18:08 They're elevating a script that I feel is undisciplined and unfocused.
18:12 Vaughn shows flashes of what he really can do,
18:15 especially in the action sequences,
18:17 but far too often, Argyle feels like a lesser version
18:20 of what he's already done on the Kingsman movies.
18:24 And it just feels like he's gone back to the spy world
18:26 one time too many here.
18:29 It's not different enough from Kingsman to feel novel,
18:32 and honestly, he could do with trying something a little bit out of the box
18:36 and getting back to basics.
18:38 Argyle is often hampered by its overlong runtime, bad CGI,
18:43 and generally feels overconfident in trying to be a franchise,
18:48 especially in its mid-credits scene,
18:51 which feels like a massive miscalculation,
18:53 especially after a perplexing ending.
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19:42 [MUSIC PLAYING]
19:45 (dramatic music)