Argylle (2024)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Cold Sweater

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Feeling at once cleverly complex and gleefully shallow, Matthew Vaughn's slick, twisty spy movie Argylle borrows bits and pieces from earlier movies, but links them together in a wildly surprising and entertaining way.

We meet superspy Argylle (Henry Cavill), on another exciting mission, tangling with the deadly LaGrange (Dua Lipa), with help from his stalwart colleagues Wyatt (John Cena) and Keira (Ariana DeBose). It turns out, however, that they are all characters created by Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a neurotic but successful novelist, who spends all her time alone with her cat, Alfie.

On a train to visit her mother, Elly meets Aidan (Sam Rockwell), who, at first, professes to be a fan, but is actually a real spy. When an attempt is made on Elly's life, he dispatches an army of attackers and saves her from the train. She learns that she is being hunted by an evil organization called The Division, led by director Ritter (Bryan Cranston), because her books have come a little to close to the details of real-life spy operations. As a result, both Aidan and the Division believe that Elly might know something about an important file that has gone missing…

Director Vaughn, following his three Kingsman movies and working from a screenplay by Jason Fuchs, finds a slightly gentler and less gruesomely violent tone with Argylle. Few innocents die here, only henchmen working for the evil organization. With his typically smooth, kinetic direction, Vaughn doesn't try for breakneck speeds, but rather spends time on characters, and on down-time, trying to come up with the next move. For a long movie (139 minutes), it has a nice pace, and it's not exhausting.

Additionally, there's a striking contrast between the perfect, sculpted "fictional" characters in Elly's books, and the more flawed "real life" characters, that feels right. And while it seems to have sprung from the seeds of Romancing the Stone, it's more progressive, giving the Elly character more to do and to ponder than simply falling in love with the hero.

Maybe Argylle isn't about much of anything — even the Kingsman movies tried to tackle subjects of war and drugs and climate change — but it's an appealing ride that checks all the right boxes and goes well with a bucket of popcorn.