You all know the drill. The secret agent has won the day against the bad guys. He stands with a beautiful woman on a balcony, a city skyline sparkling in the background as they toast to their success, waiting for the fireworks to start. “I’ll show you fireworks, the agent growls before grabbing the woman and kissing her as dazzling lights explode in the background.
That’s … really bad. Too cheesy. Elly Conway deletes the words on her laptop and tries again.
This is one of the funnier gags in “Argylle,” taking place as the shy, anxiety-ridden Elly (Bryce Dallas Howard) attempts to find the right ending for the fifth installment of her wildly popular Agent Argylle book series. As she waffles back and forth on how to end the final chapter, Argylle himself (Henry Cavill) breaks the fourth wall of the novel, regarding his creator with confusion and affront at the ridiculous things she has him do and say.
The first hour or so of “Argylle” unfolds in this same vein, poking fun at an author’s (or filmmaker’s) imagined world of espionage, where guys who look like Henry Cavill woo femme fatales, drive expensive cars on top of buildings in beautiful European cities, and somehow manage to skate by undetected – despite the fact that they literally look like Superman. But as “Argylle” twists and turns, it loses what little cleverness it had, warping itself into a bad version of the very thing it’s making fun of.
Elly’s life goes from normal to surreal when she’s approached by a real secret agent named Aidan (Sam Rockwell) on a train. Said train, it seems, is filled with a never-ending line of people who would like to see Elly dead. According to Aidan, the rogue spy organization in Elly’s books is just a little bit too similar to a real underground syndicate – and Elly is about to end up the main character in the cheesy spy novel that is her own life.
The train fight feels right in director Matthew Vaughn’s wheelhouse, similar in style to the hand-to-hand combat sequences of his “Kingsman” series, slow motion and all. Vaughn’s style can be hit and miss for me, but he fits this sequence perfectly to the tone of the film, commenting on the glamorization of the spy world without anyone having to utter a word. As Elly watches Aidan fight off the bad guys, she starts to imagine that it’s Agent Argylle instead. The differences between the two agents say everything – where Argylle is calculated, Aidan is improvisational. If Argylle swiftly moves out of a blow’s way, Aidan is unceremoniously knocked to the ground. Argylle gets to lean out of an open train window, using his hand to slick back his hair with a cocky smirk. If Aidan hits the floor too hard, he might throw his back out.
But as the film moves on, the set pieces lose this sparkle of ingenuity. The film trades in its winking nature for something far more earnest and its practicality for something far more high concept – both extremely unearned. The first set piece we see in “Argylle” takes place within the novel universe, where the secret agent is tasked with hunting down the villain LaGrange (Dua Lipa). From the moment we see Cavill’s almost trapezoidal-shaped haircut, or Dua Lipa say the words “whirly bird gets the worm,” it’s very clear how much we should not be taking this seriously, that we’re supposed to chuckling at the ridiculousness of this setup. But as the truth about Elly’s connection to this spy organization comes to light, the movie takes on all the trappings of lesser, generic spy fare. There’s star-crossed lovers, double crossings, and over the top set pieces – all delivered half-heartedly with none of the flare or commitment required to make something like this work.
Many successful spy franchises – “Mission:Impossible,” “Fast & Furious” – live and die by their earnestness. The fact that everyone in those movies is taking them about as seriously as a heart attack is part of the reason people adore them so much. But “Argylle” does not start out as one of those movies, preferring instead to light-heartedly poke fun at the spy tropes we all know and love. That’s all well and good, until the film tries to have its cake and eat it too.
