Argylle

Grade: C+

It was a very close call, but I don’t recommend Argylle. It’s a runaway train of over-ambitious ideas. It contains double-crosses, triple-crosses, twists, and reveals from those twists. I’ve seen cast members from the movie on morning talk shows all week – and looking back, it’s funny how little they are able to tell.

You can’t accuse it of being a boring film. I was absorbed, and barely looked at my watch. Director Matthew Vaughn was the man behind the camera for The King’s Man/Kingsman movies. Argylle begins with a sequence cut from that cloth. We meet Henry Cavill as Agent Argylle, a spy trying to infiltrate…something. John Cena, Ariana DeBose, and Richard E. Grant are able to communicate with him through an earpiece he wears. He is found out, and there’s a chase, and I checked out quickly, but the nitty gritty details don’t matter, because this is all a dramatization of a new espionage novel.

Elly Conway (Ron Howard’s daughter Bryce Dallas Howard) is the author, and this is her fifth book. It has quite the following, as she does Q&A sessions and other publicity. Otherwise, she’s single (the love of her life is her cat), and lives a reclusive, quiet, J.D. Salinger type existence at her home. She has FaceTime conversations with her mother (Catherine O’Hara), who thinks the book is great but laments that the so-called cliffhanger ending feels more like a copout. It takes a while for us to meet the father. I figured he was deceased or otherwise out of the picture, but no, he’s very much around – and is being saved for a too easily telegraphed twist.

Elly boards a train to visit her parents, and has a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles situation with an exuberant, talkative seat mate. He is Aidan (Sam Rockwell). It turns out that Elly’s books have eerie parallels with some real life ongoing spy stuff, and he needs her help to figure out what courses of action to take.

Performances are fun, and I almost can’t talk about the reasons why, or the depths to which they go. I’m definitely a Bryce Dallas Howard fan; she looks great here, and it’s amusing to see her spend so much time being anxious and timid, then have all of that go out the window later. At first, the worst thing she says is “BS” – not the words they stand for, literally just the letters “BS.” And then her language expands. Bryan Cranston spends much time in a fluorescent lit, seemingly underground lair, looking at large screens of video footage and barking orders.

Argylle’s best moments are when it shows its heart, like in the scene where Elly flies on an airplane for the first time ever – and how Rockwell’s character helps her through it. Tarantino would be proud of what I can only call the colored gas dance shootout (you’ll know what I mean). Other aspects are less successful. I didn’t care for what I can only call the oil skating sequence. The new Beatles song “Now and Then” showing up three times is a perplexing needle-drop. It’s easy to lose track of who to trust, and when, and whose side somebody is on, and whether they’re just pretending to be on their team. I haven’t seen any of the Kingsman movies, and Argylle ends with an attempted tie-in with that universe, in references that went over my head.

There will be people who will absolutely eat Argylle up. You might call it candy, but it’s the kind that rots your teeth and makes you feel bloated, sick, and lethargic after the sugar rush has died down.

Grade: C+