Harmless Fun, but Convoluted and Overlong
Summary
Argylle will have its fans as a lot of it is a fun spy romp with Sam Rockwell and Bryce Dallas Howard looking like they are having a ball. Henry Cavill has a smaller role than I expected and the film totally falls apart in the finale never quite knowing when to stop.
Plot: Reclusive author Elly Conway writes best-selling espionage novels about a secret agent named Argylle who’s on a mission to unravel a global spy syndicate. However, when the plots of her books start to mirror the covert actions of a real-life spy organization, the line between fiction and reality begin to blur.
Review: There wasn’t much in the trailers that made me desperately want to see Argylle on the big screen, but I felt like a night out and it has been a few weeks since I went to the movies.
The cast alone is the main selling point including Henry Cavill, Samuel L. Jackson, Sam Rockwell, John Cena and Bryce Dallas Howard. The trailers and posters making it look like Henry Cavill is the lead, but he’s actually a supporting player (as is John Cena) with Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell being the main protagonists.
Rockwell makes any movie better as he has that immediately appealing demeanor and I love how he always dances in his movies. Argylle is no different with him busting out a few moves throughout and pretty much stealing the show. I liked Bryce Dallas Howard too who must have had great fun as the introverted writer Elly Conway who gets swept up on a spy caper with Aidan Wilde (Rockwell). Catherine O’Hara is another great character actor who can come across as natural one moment and then transform into someone quite different within seconds. In terms of villains you can never go wrong with Bryan Cranston who manages to be menacing and quite serious even when the rest of the film is utterly ridiculous.
For most of the runtime all I was thinking was “I really wish they’d cast Henry Cavill as Bond and stop wasting him in shite like this”.
The first half of the movie has some fun moments with the action highlight being a fight scene on a train, but too much of the action is bogged down with CG and an overuse of disco tunes which are admittedly fun, but it takes away any sense of threat to the action.
The final 45 minutes is where the film completely lost me where it got far too convoluted with multiple twists and it just got downright silly. I can take silliness up to a point, but I find this with most Matthew Vaughn films that he never knows when to pull back, so the movie goes on far longer than it should. During one of the many final showdowns I nearly walked out as it just refused to end.
Lorne Balfe is one of the best composers in the business today and I loved his score to this movie which is jaunty and actually heroic which we rarely hear nowadays.
Overall, Argylle is not without its moments with Sam Rockwell at his scene stealing best and Bryce Dallas Howard getting a chance to genuinely shine, but it just gets so dumb that it lost me by the end which took far too long to come.
.