Review: Argylle (2024)
Given the time and budget to do everything, they did. Not in a great way.
Argylle (2024)
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Ten years ago when, between tech industry jobs I was working at a Borders bookstore — kids, it was a competitor to the Barnes and Noble bookstores you see now in shopping centers and the occasional downtown, and at a similar scale — a customer brought to the checkout counter five CDs, two DVDs, and three books, two of which were commercial best sellers. Handing him two stuffed plastic bags with his purchases, I finished the transaction by saying “And here are your fine products of the American entertainment system.”
(Yes, it’s something that a smart-ass teenager might say, but I had no such excuse; I was 46 years old at the time. I’ve been a smart-ass since age 9 and it’s a constant temptation for me still, and something that will someday make me ashamed, but that day is not yet here.)
I felt much the same way while watching “Argylle,” a product of Apple Original Films and Apple Studios.1 With its star (or star-adjacent)-filled cast, its over-produced special effects set pieces, the predictability with which plot and emotional beats tick by, and especially its use of every spy-movie trope in the catalog, “Argylle” is very much a fine product of — not just the American, but the corporate, national border-transcending, global entertainment system. Those tropes (double agents, double and triple-crossing allies and enemies, a secret code MacGuffin, hidden identities, assassin squads that threaten but are always decimated, suppressed memories, an unconscious directive triggered by a code word, and god knows what else)? The filmmakers know that the audience knows both the tropes and that they’re playing to them. Nowadays you have to either closely hew to a standard narrative that admittedly but not winkingly uses its genre’s tropes, or winkingly acknowledge that you’re not using them as much as exploiting them for the lolz. And the greater the wink, the more a film is a satire. (When the wink becomes a sneer, you’ve stopped including the audience in the joke and started playing the joke on the viewers; at the logical conclusion of this effect, you have Tarantino’s contempt for the audience.2)
“Argylle” is certainly, openly, self-knowing and -revealing — which includes the degree to which it is “meta.” This is true not only in its genre references but in the chief frame in which its narrative takes place. Plot: The life of Elly, a successful author of popular spy novels, is turned upside down when the characters and plots from her books come to life. One of these characters, a spy named Aidan (Sam Rockwell), leads (or forces) her through many situations that inevitably turn violent, scenes in which they’re doing spy things like meeting a contact at a remote castle, or (repeatedly) escaping from squads of assassins dispatched by the evil director of the secret spy agency.
When we first meet her, Elly is a novelist so popular that she gets posh book launches, complete with banners and displays and life-sized character cardboard figures, at very nice wood-paneled bookstores. (Actual authors will find this portrayal of a book tour the least believable part of the movie.) In other words, as the originator of Intellectual Property that can be turned into other media, such as films and TV series, Elly is part of the entertainment industry. In fact, given the evidently high promotion budget for her in-store appearances, one wonders why, given that it’s the fifth book in her “Argylle” series, there isn’t already a movie or TV series based on them. And the answer seems to be: this is it. “Argylle” the character — a spy mixture of Tom Cruise and Roger Moore — appears in a series of books named after him, and in this movie (played by Henry Cavill), in which the line between the real world and that of her books vanishes, and which is also named “Argylle.”
This melding of the action in her books with that of the real world of their author is first explained by someone saying that in writing her books she is somehow either predicting the future or creating it. In fact, in some Act I scenes, the spy characters who are beating each other up pause in their battle for her to decide what comes next. (“American Fiction” uses a similar trope when its main character, also a novelist, creates a new scene, but does so in a much more amusing and effective way.) Later in the film, the whole explanation changes; I don’t want to give away the twists because some viewers will enjoy them, but the new explanation has something to do with repressed memory and identity.
I don’t want to make all this seem either more complicated or interesting than it is. Savvy moviegoers will be able to spot plot twists coming, and for some viewers, such trotting ahead of the action is just what they enjoy; in fact, I think there are more of this kind of viewer than the ones who say that predictability ruins it for them. I wasn’t in either camp; I just wasn’t drawn in by the characters enough to want the story to be more original. This kind of movie is a precisely engineered roller coaster, with a specified number of thrills, twists, jokes, and moments of emotion, and no matter how twisty it gets, its general suburban viewpoint and PG-13 rating guarantees that it won’t suddenly turn really weird — like “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” in which the satire of spy films was perfectly pitched, or “Sorry to Bother You,” in which the satire of office life and rags-to-riches tropes was powered by a revolutionary spirit — but instead deliver exactly what it promises. This movie doesn’t rebel against anything; it’s not anti- anything, even assassin. It isn’t pro-anything either, except to the extent that every action movie is pro-explosion, pro-chase, pro-assassin-squad-decimation.
Elly is played by the almost-unknown Bryce Dallas Howard. I say almost unknown because IMDB says she has starred in two features, “Jurassic World Dominion” (2022) and “Rocketman,” the 2019 Elton John biopic. The role demands that she start out as a sweet-souled writer with absolutely none of the personality quirks, much less real eccentricities, that you’d expect from a creative person, and then later, by way of a different hairdo, become a devil-may-care action figure. That’s a large range and while she’s perfect for the former, she can’t manage the latter.
The director of the super-secret spy agency, the man dispatching all those assassin squads — and if I keep mentioning them, they appear in about as many separate scenes as I’ve used the phrase “assassin squad” in this review, and every time, they get pulverized — is performed with just the right mixture of Heisenberg (his character in “Breaking Bad”) and comedy by Bryan Cranston. Man, how good is this actor! It’s not easy to bring respectability to a role like this, but Cranston is great in every one of his character’s permutations. Tell me a role he’s ever been bad in.
So… to get to the meat of things. So far I’ve treated this movie on its own terms: as a comedy-action movie with a $200 million budget.3 We could also address the business angle, such as the fact that this heavily promoted movie — it was impossible not to see a trailer for it in a mainstream cineplex for the last few months — funded by Apple in quite a “let’s see what happens when we say yes to everything” way, made a microscopic $18 million in its opening weekend at over 3600 screens.
But what really is “Argylle”? It is 2 hours 19 minutes of straight white people capering. There is not a queer character, not one who is remotely even crypto-gay; there is not a black character with more than one line; there is no one who is recognizably Jewish or Asian or Latino, and that is not easy to do in America. Even in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s there was a greater diversity in the character list, if not in the cast itself. No, this is a movie about affluent white people capering across the globe, betraying not one iota of their heterosexual privilege and assumptions, not one rule of what it means to be good and white.
Most features are between 100 and 115 minutes long. They may have reasoned that the extra half-hour or so would provide them with more twists and set pieces to heighten audience enjoyment. And while they took full advantage of the extra length to fill the movie with more of those things, they didn’t help. Although, to be honest, I did enjoy the conceit where Elly (now fully transformed into a daring action figure) ice-skates through a six-inch deep oil puddle on the floor of a hockey rink-sized room full of machinery and assassins. That was fun.
Oh, and there’s a cat. If you saw the trailer, you know there’s a cat. They are rude to the cat. It isn’t funny.
Which Apple, I wondered to myself when, only a few minutes into the movie the main character puts on some music at home and we hear “Now and Then,” the Lennon cassette-tape demo that was transformed into “the Beatles’ last song.” And it’s not just incidental product placement; the song is used as an emotional beat late in the film when characters explicitly refer to it in dialogue. So it was part of the film’s script months before the song was released to the public to great fanfare in early November. Of course, any overlap between Apple Computer and Apple Corps is always a great source of irony and amusement.
After reading this, my beloved asked where the film “Don’t Look Up” lies on this spectrum, because some viewers felt its parody went too far when it impaled progressive activists along with the film’s other targets — the media, politicians, scientists, billionaires, and the Pentagon. In my opinion, the film excellently balanced its satirical critique of all these groups.
Update: A reader tells me “Do you know why it has 200 million dollar budget? Apple bought it for that. Vaughn self financed it for 90 million and sold it to them.”