As speculation continues with the ongoing lack of official word on which actor is going to take up the Bond mantle now that Daniel Craig’s run as the world’s most famous spy, it looks like one of the names in contention has bowed out of the race. Henry Cavill (who also auditioned for 2006’s Casino Royale) has long been linked with the role but, thanks to Matthew Vaughn’s new thriller Argylle, it looks like he’s starting a spy franchise all his own, playing the titular secret agent in a film that wants to serve as a springboard to an entire espionage cinematic universe. Sadly for Cavill, though, I can’t imagine anyone will want to see this series expand – Argylle is an ugly, overlong, exhausting, and ultimately just plain irritating exercise in feeble plotting disguised by a litany of ‘shocking’ twists.
As the trailers have made clear, Agent Argylle himself is a fiction within a fiction, a character written by the real hero of the story, timid espionage novelist, and meticulous researcher of all things spy-y, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), strugglinh to come up with a satisfying ending for the fifth book in her Argylle series. It’s a case of writer’s block that turns out to have international implications – Elly has somehow, with all her previous books, managed to accurately predict a series of real events involving real secret agents and now, with her novels’ stakes at their highest, dastardly agencies are after her, demanding a resolution that suits them.
It’s never a plot that feels very intuitive, constantly juddering up against its own convolutions and dragging on for far longer than it should. Even the cast seem a bit confused by everything, no-one able to spark their performances into life. Howard is notably un-compelling in the lead, Cavill becomes nothing more than an exposition merchant as Elly starts imagining Argylle guiding her through stressful situations, and even Sam Rockwell as good guy spy Wilde, assigned to protect Elly, is pretty dull.
Vaughn and writer Jason Fuchs put so much stock in their twists and big reveals (the central one of which has actually been publicly availably since Argylle was first announced back in 2021) that character and pacing get forgotten about almost entirely, and most of these twists barely hold up to scrutiny – the internal logic here is annoyingly low-effort. The result is an overlong and tedious story that it’s impossible to care about, each reveal pushing you away from the mysteries instead of drawing you in.
It’s all also shot just horribly, almost every frame saturated with ugly and weightless CG, making the action scenes a complete chore. The undeniably fun-on-paper ideas that Vaughn has, like a shootout that doubles up as a romantic dance number or a knife fight on ice skates, are ruined by the heinous, sub-videogame visuals, while the cat that has fronted a lot of Argylle’s marketing is made of just pixels for a lot of scenes, so even the ‘animal in peril’ stuff feels cheap.
Apparently all this drudgery cost $200 million, so I’m sure there’s a strong desire from the money men that the Argylle-verse should be the ‘next big thing’ but, on this evidence, I simply cannot imagine an ongoing loyal audience for it. A post-credits scene that tries to set up more Argylle, all while connecting it to Matthew Vaughn’s *other* spy series Kingsman, feels more like a threat than a promise (and frankly makes very little sense in and of itself). Argylle does nothing right, but the ways in which it’s bad aren’t even amusing (see, for example, the Sony Marvel universe), making for a franchise starter with the most fatal flaw possible – something completely and utterly forgettable.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 
Good review. To me, I’m going against the grain a little bit on my opinions about this movie. I thought it wasn’t as bad as many are making out to be as it was somewhat for fun to enjoy. However, the script for the movie was a mismanaged at times and the feature had too many convoluted twists and turns in it. Plus, I felt that Howard was a miscast in the main role. I like her as an actress, but not so much in this role. All in all, not utterly deplorable release from Vaughan, but I would rather watch one of the Kingsman movies over Argylle.