Argylle film review: A fairly twisty spy caper that's too campy for its own good

Argylle constantly swings between self-satisfied satire and urgent thriller, yielding partly fun, partly intriguing and mostly frustrating results in a film chock-full of acting heavyweights. (Photo via X / @MichaelAodhán)

“The greater the spy, the bigger the lie,” is a recurring expression in Matthew Vaughn’s multi-starrer Argylle. As a sentiment, it is publicised. As a fantasy, it is consistently nurtured. And as a sub-heading, it clings to the pop-culture phenomenon of a book and its insipid author. Argylle wants to critique spy tropes, while expanding on them. It wishes to both satirise the pomposity of franchises and disrupt the self-seriousness they are almost always dealt with. That ungainly mix of consciousness and pulp, yields partly fun, partly intriguing and mostly frustrating results in a film chock-full of acting heavyweights, but nary a convincing arc between them.

The film begins with Henry Cavill’s cocksure, spymaster Argylle, on a mission somewhere in Greece. His square haircut and gaudy velvet suit, gives away a sense of mischief. We are soon pulled back to reality, where all that poise of a gallant spy is replaced by the nervy mess of Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a popular but secretly distressed writer. Conway is the exact opposite of her literary creation, a troubled mess of anxiety and under-confidence (she can’t even ride a plane) who finds succour in her creative obsession (Argylle, the book) and nonchalant cat, Alfie. On a train journey, Conway runs into Aiden played by the terrific Sam Rockwell. In a blurry turn of events, Aiden - an actual spy - breaks the news to Conway that her books are actually predicting the future. That her imagination is, in fact, mirroring reality. Which makes her both precious and vulnerable. From thereon, the film unravels as a fairly twisty plot, spun through betrayal, memory and love.

Directed by Matthew Vaughn, Argylle features a whole host of characters played by the who’s who of Hollywood celebrity. There’s John Cena, Samuel L Jackson, Catherine O’hara, Bryan Cranston and singer Dua Lipa, who's both slick and seductive in the film. To that delectable acting spread, the film’s writing and character development doesn’t do justice. Some cameos look like they have been phoned in, in a film that constantly swings between self-satisfied satire and urgent thriller. The former is greatly reliant on the awkward charisma of the leading pair, who look nothing like the bespoke spies we ought to expect. Instead, both Conway and Aiden, look like two weathered hippies on a cross-country trip to a concert they haven’t even signed up for. At least, it elicits the kind of goofy humour you’d expect from people who look nothing like the peril and disdain they seem to attract. It’s actually the best part of the film.

Argylle is fairly knotty, silly, indulgent and even smug in places. It knows how to trash the handbook, rip apart the suits men have candidly worn to elitist missions, but can’t quite settle into the grammatical outfit of a film that knows when not to exaggerate. There are moments of genuine hilarity, piqued by twists that fit the wider roadmap of a bumpy little narrative but unfortunately, Vaughn resorts to ideas he is trying to tear apart. He has done this before with the brilliant Kick-Ass (2010), but here the juxtaposition feels flatter, inconsistent with a premise that urges you submit to flattery rather than the rude dismantling of an obnoxiously large canon of filmmaking.

Vaughn’s film has arrived on the heels of some surreal publicity. It has been adapted from a book of the same name, written by one Elly Conway who people have theorised, might actually be Taylor Swift. Rarely has a film been preceded by the kind of conjecture that elevates its own profile of expectation. To that ruse, the film is sufficiently campy and loud, fitting the gallery of lurid fantasies about spies written by anxious, immature adolescents. In the film, Conway exhibits great research skills but a sobering lack of composure and wit. She sees Argylle, not just as a manifestation of her anxiety, but also as a laborious fantasy that can never become her reality. It’s again a cheeky comment on the ritual immodesty of the genre and its creators. Flecked with macho, techno-spiritual nonsense, spy-verses also have this habit of talking down to people.

Argylle is fairly fun and entertaining when it is not caught up unknotting dense geopolitical problems. The fact that it turns to a disinterested cat for ‘aww’ moments hints at an obstacle course that could have just used the spirited, if sillier romp of two unlikely protagonists tumbling through some fairly ridiculous calamities. It’s what made Kick-Ass so endearing and earthy. This film instead can feel like a puff piece, delightful when it’s casually undressing the sternness of genre but underwhelming when it is trying to also imitate it. What if spies were just restless, edgy, silly humans with pet peeves and afflictions? Argylle grazes past the promise of that question to instead become as unnecessarily arrogant as the class of filmmaking it is trying to rupture.