These days I like to wait for the reviews to come out before watching a movie in the cinema. But the trailer looked like it had potential, so when Argylle came out in the local cinemas before the reviews really started to come in, I decided to give it a chance.The movie was very silly, even more so than the trailer had implied to me. Which is clearly not for everyone. Personally I appreciate a movie that doesn't take itself too seriously, so I was happy to embrace that sillyness and I enjoyed the movie quite a bit.
That's not to say I didn't think the movie made mistakes; it did, and the ending especially I felt didn't quite work. Despite this, I was having enough fun with the movie as a whole that I could forgive the rough patches. They were definitely having fun with the action scenes, mixing in a lot of humor. I certainly wouldn't say the action was amazing, but it was fun, with some stylish scenes that were creative and original.
The plot is a mish-mash of spy-movie tropes, a constant procession of twists and turns that kept things entertaining. Despite no specific plot point being particularly original, they were combined in a way that felt relatively new to me. I found myself predicting a lot of the plot twists just before they happened, but that didn't stop them from being enjoyable; I think some movies make a big deal out of their twists, but if you see them coming a mile away you end up feeling disappointed and unimpressed. But since this movie was fairly light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek, seeing the plot twists coming just felt like part of the fun.
The cast was great. I'm not a fan of Bryce Dallas Howard, but she was pretty good here - at least in the first half, towards the end I was starting to feel she might have been slightly miscast, but it wasn't too bad. Sam Rockwell has basically played this role before, so it's no surprise he was in his element. Bryan Cranston was great, and he got a chance to show more range in a single role than I've seen from him before. I could say the same for Catherine O'Hara actually, she nailed her role. Henry Cavill was fun as the exagerratedly cartoonish super-spy, though the role ended up being mostly a physical one. Samuel L. Jackson's role was quite small, but he did a good job with it. John Cena was really done dirty though: we know he can be very funny, but with almost no screen time and about three lines of dialogue, he was honestly wasted here.
Overall I'd rate it a 7/10, at least in terms of entertainment value. I wouldn't say it's an objectively good movie, but I had a lot of fun with it.
I didn't get this from the trailer, but while watching the movie I was struck with the sense that the story was written to appeal more to women, yet the storytelling and action felt more like the kind of film typically targetted at men. I guess that makes it a good film for couples?
The cat was a bit of a red herring? It featured heavily in the trailer yet never really did that much in the movie. I'm... not sure what the idea was there tbh.
I did rather appreciate the whole "spies can look like average people, they're not all supermodels" thing with Aiden. Contrasting Argylle acting calm and collected while getting thrown around, with Aidan's more human reactions in the same situations was a bit of fun. Although ultimately it might have been a bit out of place considering how insane everything got towards the end.
Actually, I wonder if that might be related to what some people might have found disappointing about the film. I think the whole "here's a very silly fantasy about spies, but that's not what the movie actually is" thing that the film - and the trailer - present at first, is expected to be contrasted with a more grounded approach to espionage and action. But instead the "real world" in the movie is practically as over-the-top as Elly's "unbelievable fiction" spy novel. It's not what I was expecting personally, but I wouldn't say I was disappointed; I quite enjoyed the over-the-top nonsense.
There's a lot of forced contrivances in the movie, I don't mind that and I'm not going to try to list them or anything. But one that's a little bit interesting to me is the scene in London. When Elly tried to "write the next part of the story", which the movie tells us is basically her recalling actual events, she sees Wyatt - who we learn is Aidan - getting the hacker's address for "Argylle".
So does that mean Aidan already knew where the hacker's place was, and was just pretending not to, to try to help Elly recover her memories? If so, did he not manage to find the journal himself in the last five years - despite being the one who found it this time? If he had found it before Alfie wouldn't have had to break the encryption as they would have done it ages ago. Let's not worry about the fact that there was an explosion in the appartment, and it got renovated with wallpaper later, yet the floors were fine and no-one ever found the journal under the floorboards.
Was Aidan actually not there, as her writing/memories implied? The bad guys clearly didn't know about the place, and the movie strongly suggests that Elly couldn't have found the address herself and needed Aidan for that. Did he not have a chance to check the appartment after the explosion, or did he just assume that nothing useful would have survived? For some reason the more I wonder about this particular plot point, the more questions I have about the plot of the whole movie.
Like why did Aidan decide to make his move just then, despite having been watching Elly for five years? My theory is that Ruth panicked when she found out Elly was on her way to their "house", because Ruth wouldn't be able to make it there in time to meet her, so she ordered the agents watching Elly to kidnap her. I'm not sure what the plan would have been after that, but regardless: Aidan realised the plan, and knew that if they got what they needed out of her they wouldn't need her alive anymore, so he decided to grab her before it was too late as he might not get another chance.
Well, more realistically it was probably another forced contrivance and the writers didn't really think about whether it made actual sense or not. But it's kinda interesting to think about how it might make sense.
When Ritter showed up and started talking about the retinal scan, I assumed they Elly and Aidan had set a trap for him so they could use him for the retinal scan. It made more sense than the idea that these two super-spies were just standing there with their guard down like a pair of morons. But no, they were just standing there with their guard down like a pair of morons. To me that was the point where the movie kind of stopped working.
That scene was followed by the last fight, where a brainwashed Elly was ordered to kill Aidan. I didn't think this scene was well done at all. Aidan just kind of stood there, he never tried to get creative, or, well, try at all really. When he fought back he didn't do too badly (depite having been shot in the heart a few minutes ago), but he never took advantage of the openings he had, never tried to come up with a better solution than "let myself get beat up because I don't want to hurt Elly".
He wasn't exactly hemmed in; he could have easily jumped the railings and tried to outmanouver Elly to get to Ruth - and Ruth would have been forced to send Elly after him, so he wouldn't have needed to worry about Elly destroying the computer console or anything. Or - having seen the brainwashing stop when the music stopped - he could have tried to block her from hearing the music, by yelling or clapping his hands on her ears or clanging pieces of metal together or something. But he didn't, he didn't even try to do anything, he just just put up a brief token resistance then stopped even doing that.
I didn't really understand what what going on with him at the end of the fight. He was acting like everything was OK, telling Elly not to worry, as if she could hear him. But it really wasn't alright, they were pretty much both about to die. He was literally encouraging her to kill him! How about trying to get her to snap out of it? How about trying to bluff Ruth into making a mistake? How about not talking and instead trying to think of a way out of this? How about trying ANYTHING? I dunno, it was just weird.
Another thing, Elly completely failed to fight the brainwashing? That's... I dunno, you like to believe that the protagonist who can take down anyone and everyone can at least try to fight back against some sort of mental manipulation? I mean, it's not like we're talking supernatural powers here. I get that they wanted this big reveal where Keira turns out to still be alive, but there had to be a better way of doing it; the whole scene was just irritating. Also I don't really care that Keira is still alive? Like, she wasn't a character that I had any reason to care about or anything. If they wanted us to actually care about her, they needed to spend more time giving us a reason to care about her.
When Henry Cavill showed up at the end playing some American dude, I didn't really get what the movie was saying when he asked Elly if she had any questions for him. What kind of questions did he expect her to ask? It's not like he knew that Argylle looked exactly like him in Elly's head; we'd only ever seen Argylle represented as a simplistic cartoon outside of her imagination.
The movie did get me thinking about something. There's been a lot of action movies in the last few years with female protagonists. Without getting too deep into the topic of "girlbosses" and "Mary Sues", I will say that I didn't think Argylle suffered from too many of the issues that can plague these movies.
