'Argylle' is a Real Movie. It Plays Like a Fake One.
William Bibbiani takes on Matthew Vaughn's latest.
Today I’m pleased to share William Bibbiani’s review of Argylle. William is a film critic and the co-host of The Critically Acclaimed Network. -David
Everyone loves a good fake movie. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that everyone loves a bad one. (This will, in a moment, bring me to Matthew Vaughn’s romantic spy comedy Argylle.)
There is a longstanding rule in movies, where if there’s a fake movie inside of a real movie, that fake movie has to look extra fake. Otherwise audiences might get confused and think the fake movie is the real one, or worse, they might wish they were watching the fake movie instead. Fake movies are fun because they have permission to be both self-serious and ridiculous. It’s easy to get away with superficial nonsense like Angels with Filthy Souls, the ultraviolent and badly-acted gangster movie Kevin McAllister watches in Home Alone, when it only takes up thirty seconds of screen time.
(At this point I’m going to point out that Argylle, which is almost indistinguishable from a fake movie, is two hours and nineteen minutes long.)
There’s a second reason why fake movies look extra fake in real movies, and that’s because they make the real movie look better in comparison. This is especially useful when the real movie is, as is often the case, also very fake. The absurdist comedy Bowfinger takes place in a version of Hollywdood where films like Chubby Rain and Fake Purse Ninjas are real productions, so it’s easier to believe that the people making those movies are total goofballs. Even the glossy musical sentimentality of the Annie remake looks like Italian neorealism when it also features a trailer for Moonquake Lake, a fake YA romance where Ashton Kutcher falls for a mermaid from the moon played by Mila Kunis.
The problem is that Argylle blurs the line between fake stories and real stories until the line nearly ceases to exist. More specifically, in this case, fake books, which are dramatized just like fake movies. These fake stories in Argylle, about a spy named “Argylle” with a zero-gravity haircut played by Henry Cavill, are total hogwash, the most shallow and overblown type of escapist entertainment. And that makes sense, because this film isn’t so much about Argylle as it is about the author of the Argylle books, Elly Conway, played by Bryce Dallas Howard.
She gets swept up in an actual spy plot, just like the characters in her ridiculous books, and the film repeatedly cuts back and forth between her “real” adventure and the “fake” adventure in her head. Except there’s no contrast between the two. In fact, the most important plot point in Argylle is that Elly Conway’s books aren’t supposed to be shallow and insipid (although they are). They’re supposed to be so incredibly accurate and realistic that they’ve predicted actual political crises. Elly Conway’s stories are so authentic that real spies are impressed, and her work has been favorably compared to celebrated espionage authors like John le Carré, whose work is absolutely nothing like Argylle except they use some of the same words.
So the fakeness of Argylle is supposed to be “accurate.” We’re not comparing a “real” spy story to an amusingly fake spy story. Instead, the “real” spy story goes out of its way to be as artificial as humanly possible, and then has the unmitigated gall to pretend that its badness is kinda clever.
The way it goes is, Elly Conway is about to finish the fifth book in the “Argylle” series, but her ending is anticlimactic and lousy. So she takes a train to visit her parents and clear her head, when she runs into Aiden (Sam Rockwell), a mystery man who claims he’s a real-life spy, and that her brilliant, realistic writing — realistic writing that includes scenes of Henry Cavill power-sliding a half-demolished car across the rooftops of an Italian city for half a mile — has uncovered a real-life conspiracy.
Now, Elly and her usually-CGI pet cat are getting dragged around the world from one action-packed scenario after another, while Aiden tries to get her to figure out what happens next in her book. If they don’t track down a flash drive containing all the secret files it takes to bring down the bad guys, those bad guys will… just keep on being bad guys, doing bad guy stuff. (They don’t seem to have any schemes other than stopping Aiden and Elly from stopping their schemes.)
The screenplay by Jason Fuchs, whose previous credits include Pan (yikes) and Wonder Woman (yay), could have coasted on its main premise. It’s another modern riff on Romancing the Stone, where two attractive actors with lots of chemistry go on an adventure that the movie admits is implausible, but gives us an excuse to enjoy it anyway. And to their credit, Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell, who each look like they haven’t had this much fun in years, are delightful in almost any situation. Even when they’re making “wacky” jokes about stomping on bad guys’ heads until they die.
But the script for Argylle has absolutely no faith in itself and before long, practically every scene includes a new, game-changing twist designed to push the story forward (logic and character development be damned). This kind of breakneck game of storytelling Twister can be entertaining when the twists make sense, and are married with an emotionally-involving story with interesting characters. Or heck, even just one of those. You can even get away with almost anything if you don’t overdo it, but “overdoing it” is something Argylle is determined to do, over and over.
When twists make no sense whatsoever — which you could say about literally every twist in Argylle — they become a constant distraction. No matter how much you try to lose yourself in Elly and Aiden’s adventures, which should have been easy since Matthew Vaughn is nothing if not a spirited filmmaker, every few scenes there’s a new plot development which means that everything you just watched was pointless. And by the end, which itself has so many twists it’s easy to lose count, you realize that literally everything in this movie, even the parts that were genuinely exciting and fun, simply shouldn’t have happened.
Argylle is a movie that gradually reveals why Argylle shouldn’t have been made. Alfred Hitchcock used to talk about what he called “Refrigerator Logic,” in which the plot of a movie has a fatal flaw, but the audience doesn’t realize it until they get home, open the refrigerator, and suddenly think “Wait a minute, the bad guys’ plan in Die Hard 2 could have been thwarted at any time if anyone had just radioed the planes from another airport and told them to land somewhere else.” (Hitchcock never saw Die Hard 2. That example was mine. But it still bugs me, dang it.)
Without giving it all away — and that’s just about all Argylle has going for it, “stuff to give away” — Argylle doesn’t just fail the refrigerator test; it installs refrigerators in the theater so you don’t have to wait until you get home to be distracted and annoyed.
And that’s a shame because, again, this cast is trying their darnedest to turn up the charm. Give Bryce Dallas Howard an excuse to be lovable and she’ll never let you down. Sam Rockwell reminds us why he used to be Hollywood’s secret weapon, before the secret got out and he moved into the Oscar clubhouse. Bryan Cranston is very Bryan Cranston, which is more than most people can say, and you can always rely on Catherine O’Hara, who plays Elly’s mother, to turn comedy straw into comedy gold.
To be fair, I have to admit that sometime before the credits rolled I found myself able to enjoy Argylle’s slick artificiality. It was pointless, certainly, but relatively harmless. Some day, down the road, after it stops being rude to talk about spoilers, we’ll be able to have fun conversations about all the many, many, many better movies Argylle shamelessly cribs from, and perhaps even have a genuinely thoughtful conversation about the movie’s obvious queer subtext. (Obvious, that is, to everyone except the characters in the film and, apparently, the people who made it.)
But because it’s still rude to talk about spoilers we’ll save those truly fun conversations about Argylle for another time. Which unfortunately means we’ll also have to postpone the serious discussion about how, not too long before the credits finished rolling, it stopped being fun all over again (and made less sense than ever). -William Bibbiani
Stuff David Chen Has Made
Over on Decoding TV this week, Patrick Klepek and I discuss Jon Stewart’s return to The Daily Show and shared our thoughts on Masters of the Air (meh) and Expats (not bad!). Check it out.
On the Filmcast, we discussed Society of the Snow, a harrowing and incredible film.
Also, in case you missed it, check out the video I made about my five favorite films of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
That's decided it. I'm going.
All in all at least this film looks like a fun one to watch with friends