The meta-spy thriller Argylle makes its own joke – and that’s the problem

Matthew Vaughn, the mastermind of a series of sadistically inventive action films, including Super awesome and the Kingsman series, wants to keep things a little lighter with his new spy romp, Argylle. “What the film actually came from was watching Romanticize the stone with my daughters,” he told Polygon during a brief interview at a London hotel after a screening of the film. Vaughn rode out the 2020 COVID lockdown by showing movies to his wife and teenage daughters, and the 1984 romantic adventure with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner “played like gangbusters,” he said. “And they said, ‘Well, you should please make a movie like this for us.'”

He has that and he doesn’t have that. There are some clear similarities in the premise: Romanticize the stone is about a novelist who gets sucked into a dangerous post-warRaiders of the Lost Ark smuggling plot in the wilds of Colombia that could have come straight from the pages of one of her own books. (from 2022 The lost city follows a similar plot, in another clear homage to Romanticize the stone.) ArgylleIn the meantime, introduces lonely author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who writes spy thrillers in the James Bond model, centering on the dashing super spy Aubrey Argylle (Henry Cavill). Struggling with the ending of her latest book, Elly is approached out of the blue by a real-life spy, Aidan (Sam Rockwell), who says she is being hunted by an evil syndicate called The Division because her books have predicted their plans with uncanny accuracy . and they think she holds the key to their next move.

However, Vaughn isn’t the type to take a setup like this at face value. The restless, postmodern ingenuity of his staging – especially when it comes to action – drives him to create multiple levels in the story. First, Vaughn builds a layer of in-fiction around the characters and action in Elly’s books, starring Cavill, John Cena, Ariana DeBose, and Dua Lipa in a deliberately ridiculous series of cinematic spy action thrillers. He then throws his two story worlds together. When Division agents attack Elly and Aidan on a train, a confused Elly continues to hallucinate Aidan switching places with the fictional Argylle amid the ensuing arguments – sometimes even mid-blow.

That fight scene is a bravura set piece, brilliantly edited and executed with winning energy and precision by Howard, Rockwell and Cavill. Very clever violence is what Vaughn does – perhaps better than any other director. While some viewers may reject the easy unreality and tacky VFX of the opening “fictional” action scene, the train fight will likely bring them back on board. But when it comes to metafictional shenanigans, Vaughn is just getting started.

Jason Fuchs’ screenplay is built around a series of twists and reversals, some of which are easier to see, but none of which are particularly difficult to predict. With each, Vaughn tears a slightly larger hole in the veil between the film’s two levels: the “real” adventure of Elly and Aidan, and the in-fiction exploits of Argylle and friends. And not just in terms of the characters or the plot mechanics. The tones of these two fictional layers begin to infect each other, and Elly’s reality, which was never that grounded to begin with, becomes increasingly archaic and fantastic.

There is also a metafictional layer outside the film. According to its publicity, Argylle is inspired by a new spy novel by a real Elly Conway, whose vague biography bears some similarities to that of the fictional Elly. The book is real – it has just been published, you can buy it – and it is pure spy fiction about Aubrey Argylle, just like the fictional Elly’s books.

But its origins are so mysterious that the internet was able to briefly convince itself that Taylor Swift wrote it. Vaughn swears a manuscript landed in his lap just as he was considering his own Romanticize the stonestyle project, and he mischievously decided to combine the two. But the film clearly doesn’t have a “custom” credit, and the way the fictional Elly’s character is developed in the film could give audiences even more reason to doubt the real Elly’s… reality.

What came first: the book or the movie? Is this movie’s origin story just a marketing gimmick? The backstory only adds to the atmosphere of smug artificiality Argylleand by the time a stunning mid-credits scene plays out, the audience may feel fooled and a little removed from it all.

Image: Universal Pictures/Apple Original Movies

This kind of clever ironization of pop culture is a matter of taste, and it’s hardly a surprise coming from Vaughn. But it seems to me that it can’t help but undermine the film and get in the way of its original intention of making a fun, light-hearted, romantic thriller. Romanticize the stone mold. Howard and Rockwell are both funny, charismatic actors, but it’s a struggle for them to build real romantic chemistry amid all the Argylle‘S layered artificiality.

The film has a kind of campy energy that transcends its ingenuity – just like “Electrical energy”, the impossibly catchy piece of manufactured soundtrack disco it promotes. But even the most joyous moments, like a gunfight choreographed as a swooning Technicolor ballroom dance for Rockwell and Howard, feel insincere and funny, as if they were enclosed in quotation marks.

Romanticize the stone is a frothy film with a self-aware premise, but the key to its appeal is that its creators and stars buy into that premise and play it like they mean it. The director, Robert Zemeckis, is a master in this tricky tonal space: the simultaneously sincere, comic and fantastic voice that characterized his films Back to the future, Who framed Roger RabbitAnd Forrest Gump. Otherwise, it would be difficult to believe in the film’s characters, or to be drawn into their high-stakes escapades, or to enjoy Douglas and Turner’s electric on-screen chemistry.

That raised, faux-sincere voice isn’t just a function of romantic adventure films. Also in the spy genre, the more ridiculous the plots, the more direct the execution has to be before the filmmakers can get away with it. The Mission: Impossible films are patently silly, but the engine that drives them is Tom Cruise’s fiercely palpable belief that everything that happens on screen is deadly serious – so much so that in real life he jumps out of a plane to to prove it.

Argylle is too winking, too eager to show that it’s in on its own joke, to admit any real romantic feeling or any excitement that goes deeper than the surface level of its flashy choreography. Vaughn, the mischievous ringmaster, delights in challenging audiences to figure out what’s real and what’s fictional within his stylized, nested worlds. It’s just that he never really answers the question: why should we worry? Of Argylle, he sets up a playful, riveting thriller with an all-star cast and dazzling action, but then keeps the audience at a distance from it, just to show how clever he was in putting it together. The really smart thing would have been to let the dumb movie be joyfully dumb, and invite the audience to lose themselves in it.

Argylle will be in cinemas from February 2.