Movie Review: Argylle

 

This whole making movies thing is pretty new for the Apple corporation as they just entered the entertainment space in the late 2010's. When you pair an effectively bottomless corporate bank account with a desire to lure subscribers to a streaming service that has the thinnest catalog of third-party programming of any major platform, you get a situation where executives are hurling obscene amounts of money at writers/directors with cache in the industry to make shit that will hopefully get audiences excited enough to sign up for Apple TV+ and stick around to see what else they have to offer to atone for their lack of marginally popular basic cable series from 10-20 years ago. Enter Argylle-an ensemble spy action comedy from Matthew Vaughn (Kingsman trilogy, Kick-Ass) and one of the first mainstream blockbusters the company acquired the rights to. Vaughn and co. should consider themselves blessed to have cashed out when Apple was still green enough in Hollywood to throw out $200+ million paydays without hesitation because their days of greenlighting movies like Argylle are likely numbered.

The setup of Argylle is simple enough: A reclusive spy novelist (Bryce Dallas Howard) has her quiet life abruptly shattered when she encounters a real-life spy (Sam Rockwell) on a train and learns that the bestselling franchise (also called Argylle) she wrote has correctly predicted real espionage events around the globe and there are some very powerful people that want to intimidate, kidnap and/or kill her on account of her unusual gift. What ensues after this situation that was very cleanly depicted in the trailer is roughly 100 consecutive minutes of pervasively silly anarchy. Seriously, the audacity of the stupidity that Vaughn cooks up here is simply stunning to witness. It's almost like Vaughn was trying to see just how far he could go with the cartoonish nature of the film before someone at Apple reigned him in and they seemingly never did.

The plot twists become so frequent by the time the second act rolls around that it's actually surprising when someone or something is actually on the level. The action sequences are a frenzied combination of Vaughn's love of staging video game-esque moments of rapid-fire mass carnage and his secret desire to become a song-and-dance man. Vaughn even manages to give the insane Hitler tease from The King's Man a run for its money with a mid-credits scene that delivers one final bizarre blast of stupidity before the auditorium lights come back on.     

As somebody whose limit for over-the-top absurdity in action movies is nearly infinite, I found Argylle to be an entertaining, well-casted romp that got better as it got sillier. For a lot of other people, its unrelenting stupidity is going to make one of the most painful watches they've endured in recent history. Unleashing something so dumb and whacky onto audiences expecting something like Kingsman or even just a more straight-down-the-middle spy movie is a pretty horrible idea considering that audiences are arguably fickler than ever, especially since Apple elected to release it widely in theaters where word-of-mouth continues to hold its greatest weight. Regardless of the questionable economics attached to every stage of its release, I'm glad that a movie like Argylle was given the chance to exist and I hope that its commercial and critical failure won't stop other filmmakers from having the courage to fully embrace their inner unapologetic goofy idiot like Vaughn did here. 

Grade: B