Argylle

Argylle

Director Matthew Vaughn’s “Argylle” is a sluggish, overcooked action movie. It starts with a joke: Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) infiltrates a Greek-set club and finds himself face to face with a blonde LaGrange (Dua Lipa) in a sparkly gold dress.

They engage in some sultry dancing before she is shot down by a bunch of baddies, whom he escapes from with the help of his team, tech guru (Ariana DeBose) and sidekick (John Cena), chasing her through narrow streets in a James Bondian set piece only for them to exchange banal dialogue when he finally catches up. “You and I are not so different,” says LaGrange. “You’re a terrorist,” retorts Argylle. “It seems we serve the same master,” she says. You laugh anyway.

But that’s because these characters are cardboard cutouts from a dime-store spy novel especially Cavill’s garish high-top haircut. They’re creations of author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is writing the fifth book in her best-selling series, Argylle.

Jason Fuchs’ script keeps an even pace as it develops this spoof: Afflicted by writer’s block with her cat Alfie, Elly boards a train to see her mother (Catherine O’Hara). Onboard, she meets Aidan (Sam Rockwell). The scruffy stranger isn’t the dashing Argylle; he’s just another spy one that might be too easily overlooked or underestimated.

POV shots from Elly’s eyes lead to an effective editing trick: Between blinks, Rockwell’s visage becomes Cavill’s face, blending reality with fiction.

Aidan is here to extract the nervous spy novelist; assassins sent by Director Ritter (Bryan Cranston), the head of undercover agency the Division, believe she knows the whereabouts of a flash drive containing classified information. Why is she their target? Unknown to Elly, the details of her novels match several real missions that make one think she might be a spy.

For a time, as Elly and Aidan work on recovering the drive, the thin plotting is enough; it feels free and easy as it pokes fun at larks like “National Treasure,” “The Lost City,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight” and the Bourne franchise and Vaughn’s own Kingsman series.

But then it forgets what joke it wanted to tell and tries to become a straight-up spy movie. It sputters in its attempt to reengineer the mechanics of better films.

Samuel L Jackson, Richard E. Grant and DeBose are major stars who fell victim to a blank script affording them thankless roles. Flat lighting gives way to jagged action/choppier editing artificially boosted by no less than three bombastic plays of the Beatles’ discovered track “Now and Then.” I don’t want to call this a cheap needle drop because that song probably cost a boatload of money, but reviving John Lennon’s voice only to immediately sell usage of his recently finished demo to a flabby action vehicle strikes me as ghoulish.

Still, there are moments: A scene with Alfie would be more adorable if the VFX around the cat wasn’t rough around some edges. O’Hara has fun doing her best Marlene Dietrich à la “Witness for the Prosecution.” Cranston adds amusing beats to an otherwise one-note character.

However ironic it may be that Vaughn finds himself unable to know when or how to end in a movie born out of Elly’s writing an unsatisfactory final chapter, this is still the case.

There are some easy twists that I will not reveal here, but one must suffice to say that the more he tries to explain things, the less fun it becomes for everyone involved (the random changing from color photography to black and white does him no favors). For a while there, a kooky Rockwell is playing his most compelling character in years until the movie insists on making him a love interest.

Also somehow Howard loses power as Elly’s backstory comes into focus. The two of them circle the narrative drain, never able to find their way onto a path that balances “Argylle”’s newfound earnestness with its previous acts’ silliness. Everything builds up to a big hallway set piece which aims for quirky and operatic but ends up being quite possibly the dreariest action scene ever filmed. Vaughn has no grasp of human bodies moving through space and instead amps up his usual desire to stretch fight choreography into rubbery unnaturalness even further than usual.

It’s too bad! “Argylle” could have been an incredibly smart send-up. Instead it seems like it gets sick of being the joke before telling one! But by trying so hard not to be just a gag by insisting on connecting this film with the Kingsman franchise Vaughn makes it anonymous instead; forgettable merely.

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