Film Review - Argylle (2024)

Argylle is based off of the novel and is the new film by Matthew Vaughn who you may remember from such films as the Kingsman series and Kick-Ass and this time Henry Cavill stars as Agent Argylle the focus of a series of spy novels written by Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) but while Elly is on a train trip one day she meets a real life spy (Sam Rockwell) and hijinks ensue.

Watching the preview for this movie I kept thinking to myself “This will either be great fun or a complete mess” and sadly it is the latter that has won out as I really didn’t like this movie.

Firstly this thing gets so bogged down in twists and turns and surprise reveals that the more this goes on especially in the second half of the film I just sat there going “What” more and more and they also just left me scratching my head more often than not and look I like twists and surprise reveals but it’s a form of slight of hand and when it goes wrong like it does here you find yourself standing there with your pants down and the audience laughing at the colour of your underwear.

M Night Shyamalan when he does this well can sometimes leave enough of a bread crumb trail to where you want to watch that film again to find those clues which sometimes can be right in front of your face but you don’t notice it until the last minute and it works wonderfully well but here it doesn’t and it just makes watching the film all the more baffling and frankly boring.

Next up this movie thinks it is so much more funny and exciting than it really is and I just got so fucking sick of it, every other line in this movie feels like a bad attempt at a joke and I just do not think this works and I’m fed up with it and it’s not just this movie, most big movies now do this and also they do the big action setpiece set to a jazzy jukebox tune and I’m over that bullshit as well.

And this leads me to my next problem with this movie and that is Vaughn’s direction, it just feels so lazy and uninspired as he’s just doing the same thing he’s been doing since Kingsman: The Secret Service nearly 10 years ago and I love that film as well as a lot of Vaughn’s early movies like Stardust and Kick-Ass but here it’s the same over the top fights, the same quasi jokey atmosphere, the same jukebox soundtrack and the same tongue in cheek humour and it feels like the same fucking thing that has now grown so tiresome I’m sick of seeing it.

And next is the cast and almost all of them are wasted here, Bryan Cranston is a great actor but here it just feels like he was just told to be a villain again and he does that, Ariana DeBose, John Cena and Dua Lipa may as well have had their roles played by day player actor as they do next to nothing with the thankless roles their given, Catherine O’Hara plays the same neurotic mother she played in Home Alone 30 plus years ago but she doesn’t go ELLY!! Like she did KEVIN!! In those films while Sam Rockwell I just found to be annoying with his constant talking all the time in dumb spy movie lines.

But the biggest waste is Henry Cavill as Argylle, I mean this is a man who many few was worthy of the mantle of being Superman (no easy task I assure you) and who many more would like to see be the next James Bond and like Daniel Craig in Layer Cake from 2004 Cavill gets the chance to prove he could be a great 007 but no he’s barely in this movie and he doesn’t really get the chance to properly prove he could be a great Bond and that is a genuine shame.

And lastly I love Cats but the Cat in this movie doesn’t get to do anything, no one gives him a fuss or a pat and he doesn’t get to be shown any love by Elly instead he’s a digitally rendered Cat which is obvious at times and he feels more like a prop instead of a cute and cuddly character.

What a waste this movie is, a waste of talent, money, resources and a cute kitty and if there is a worse movie than this one this year then it will most certainly be a bad year at the cinema, 1 out of 5.