With the advantage of week since I’ve seen this movie, I can say definitively that Argyle is in its “oh shit” phase of financial catastrophe, which is nice, because we are so often put in situations in which the bad guys get away with being kind of low-key shitty but in a shady enough way that no one notices or understands the depth of how bad they were being, but in this case, after the initial wave of audiences went to opening weekend for this $200 million budget movie, they faithfully reported that this movie with so much promise and so much buzz was, in fact, quite stupid.
You may remember, like Friend who saw it with me, that this movie had a copyCAT a few months back called Freelance, which so successfully confused me that we saw it as a big group, because the question “how many spy movies can John Cena be in in the span of six months” was not something we had asked ourselves up until that point. The reason we had flocked to see the fake-out, low budget Argyle is because it hosted such a golden panoply of cast members as the exalted Samuel L Jackson, Dua Lipa, looking very fine in her dress, making her acting debut, Sam Rockwell, Henry Cavill back from television graveyard, and, yes, John Cena. But as is correctly noted in Jackson Weaver‘s CBC review (along with the most epic and thorough of roasts a movie like this deserves), those actors are only nominally in this movie, for the briefest peppering of a moment so as to grace the trailer like little pied pipers, luring you to your doom. Friend astutely notes that it appears that someone has given Sam Jackson the direction of “watch a Lakers game and we’ll throw something up on the green screen for you” for most of his appearance, and Dua Lipa gets Taylor Swifted a lot harder in this movie than Taylor Swift did in Amsterdam. Henry Cavill is part of this really annoying effect that they do for the first hour of the film where Bryce Dallas Howard’s Elly Conway will close her eyes and the screen will darken in the shape of eyelids closing, I guess? Even when she’s kind of blacking out from fear(???) while parachuting out of a train (Weaver describes this as a confusingly uncited homage to Bullet Train)? But anyway, Elly spends a lot of time in this movie sort of blinking and toggling between Sam Rockwell’s Aiden Wylde (get it?) and Henry Cavill’s fictional bond parody Argyle (Weaver says that the parody is so indistinct as to be completely forgettable).
There isn’t really a reason for it except later when there is (and at this point I’m going to ruin the movie for you because you haven’t seen it yet or you have and you also know it’s dumb?), because the reason this keeps happening is because, unbeknownst to Elly, she’s actually NOT a successful small town writer of spy novels. She’s a sort of Winter Soldier-type sleeper agent who’s been hypnotized against her will to forget that she was ever an agent. This twist is supposed to one up the earlier twist of the movie where Bryan Cranston and Kevin’s mom from Home Alone are not in fact Elly’s parents, but simply stand-ins for her parents (who apparently are not alive to notice their daughter had become such a successful spy novelist, I guess), because they’re the heads of an evil extra-governmental spy consortium doing evil across the world. And THAT twist is supposed to one-up the earlier twist that Elly’s dad is really her dad and also the head of an evil spy agency, unbeknownst to her, which she’s outed by writing prescient plots about exactly what his agency is doing while/before it does evil things.
Which is to say, this movie really lacked impulse control and an editor at 140 minutes. Reflecting on the movie afterwards with Friends, it struck me that Argyle felt a lot like Split (2017), in that the whole movie, which had such a cool original premise and pretty neat delivery, was actually just a vessel for an end credits scene that tries to reboot and create a franchise. In this case, it was a sliiiiiightly more expensive gambit than Split.
So the reasons for seeing this movie are pretty few. The phrase that Wife used from a review she’d read is that Argyle is more of a successful buzz campaign than it is a movie, teasing the maybe-Taylor-Swiftiness of the anonymous author of the actual Argyle book series (spoiler: it’s not them and the spoiler isn’t even interesting enough to go into more detail about), gaslighting viewers into thinking Dua Lipa might be in more than the trailer sequence, and just generally overselling the centrality of a having a cat along for the ride (the cat does NOT stay on for the ride unless a joke necessitates the cat is there). So, I’ll just reiterate that it’s probably not my first favorite action comedy spy movie starring Sam Rockwell (Mr Nice Guy), but he does “dance a lot” as Friend points out, and if you like watching him fight all scrappy and get beat up a lot, there is that too, but otherwise, the movie is really just bloat and fighting back groans as another dumb twist tries to force you out of your chair or your couch (when this inevitably gets dumped onto its parent producer Apple Movies for its brief life as a streaming movie).
The Winter Soldier hypnosis sequence and backstory involving mind control leaves a lot more questions than it solves for me. Like, why is it so effective after all that time? And why not just do it to her again once they capture her, if it’s something that worked so well the first time? And at that point, why not just reboot Orphan Black? All of Elly’s double-crossing seems really strange especially once you realize that she is actually still pretty solidly in the clutches of her indoctrination. But ultimately, this is so so messy–who approved the final boss fight?
Half a Babadook and skip this.
https://time.com/6622198/bryce-dallas-howard-argylle-body-interview
