Have you seen any of those viral videos of wildly extravagant Gender Reveals where things go terribly wrong? At first, you can’t help but watch and shake your head at the madness of it all and maybe even admire the boldness of the narcissism, but eventually you kick yourself for wasting your time watching some idiots filling the sky with blue and/or pink smoke and fireworks as the whole thing falls apart in spectacularly awful fashion.
That’s pretty much how I felt watching “Argylle.” In fact, one of the many, many, many extended action sequences in this film actually reminded me of a Gender Reveal gone bonkers, and not in a good way.
Clocking in at a bloated and self-indulgent 2 hours and 19 minutes, filled with VFX sequences so cheesy you wonder if they’re supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, and bogged down by a plot so convoluted you’ll be reaching for the aspirin, “Argylle” is a bright shining pile of mediocrity. There’s no denying the aggressively creative talents of director Matthew Vaughn (the “Kingsman” franchise, “Kick-Ass”) and we’ve got a whopper of a cast on hand trying to make this thing work, but the twists and turns and reveals become increasingly far-fetched — and even worse, we kinda stop caring about these folks because they’re all in a live-action cartoon within a cartoon.
Filled with casual, PG-13 violence, “Argylle” features some OK scenery and occasionally interesting production design, but director Vaughn pulls out all the stops as if he’s the drummer doing a 15-minute solo that stops a concert dead in its tracks. It’s showmanship for showmanship’s sake. (Speaking of music: The pop music needle drop kicking off the stylized shootout sequence, can we all agree that’s been done to death?)
The wonderful Bryce Dallas Howard is perfectly cast as Elly Conway, who is the author of a best-selling series of espionage novels about a dashing secret agent named Argylle but in real life is a homebody who is afraid of flying and prefers to spend nights curled up with her computer and her Scottish Fold cat, who gets a lot of screen time, and it’s a good rule of thumb to be suspicious of movies that depend heavily on wacky pet-reaction shots.
In the fictionalized depictions of the “Argylle” novels, Henry Cavill (sporting a ridiculous haircut for no apparent reason) is Argylle, John Cena is Argylle’s loyal partner Wyatt, Ariana DeBose is the tech genius Keira and Dua Lipa is a one-dimensional femme fatale named LaGrange. As Elly struggles to come up with the perfect ending for her latest “Argylle” novel, she finds herself on a train and meeting Sam Rockwell’s Aidan, an actual spy who eventually explains that the events in her books keep playing out in real life: “You’re a god---- fortune teller, Elly. What you wrote in your book actually happened, and you kicked a hornet’s nest you didn’t even know existed.”
Wait, what? From that point forward, the lines between reality and Elly’s imagined world keep blurring as Elly tries to stay alive and everyone tries to take possession of some stupid thingee. Sometimes Elly sees Henry Cavill/Argylle engaging in deadly battles with a standard-issue underground syndicate headed by Bryan Cranston’s Ritter; other times it’s the wisecracking, sloppy-looking but lethal Aidan doing the heavy lifting.
Is Aidan the real Argylle? Is it someone else? Has Elly lost her mind? Why is Samuel L. Jackson watching the Lakers on a giant TV in a villa in wine country in France, while Catherine O’Hara as Elly’s mother makes her way from Chicago to London to be with her troubled daughter? These and many other questions will be answered before we get to the finish line, but by then, we’re more exhausted than interested — and the promise of more “Argylle” adventures seems more daunting than exciting.
