'Argylle' review: the cat lady as a secret agent, but less funny

For months, one question has plagued moviegoers: “Who is the real Agent Argylle?” It's a question posed by Samuel L. Jackson in the ubiquitous trailer for Matthew Vaughn's action-comedy spy story “Argylle,” though the trailer presents more pressing questions, such as: Who thought a flat cap Was Henry Cavill a good idea? O: Why do we write “argyle” with two Ls?

Unfortunately, those last questions remain a mystery, but the film addresses the first, delving into the convoluted identity of the real Agent Argylle for an absolutely excruciating 2 hours and 19 minutes. It's truly remarkable: “Argylle” has deep structural problems on a fundamental level, but it's also a failure in directorial execution from top to bottom, resulting in what has to be one of the worst, most expensive films ever made. It's honestly fascinating, something that should be studied in a laboratory.

This review will have to suffice. The good news is that there are a couple of bright spots in “Argylle” among all the green screen digital garbage. The first is that it has a fun premise, which is that a shy and anxious spy novelist, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), gets caught up in a real-life globe-trotting spy plot and turns out she's actually pretty good at it. . It's as if Jason Bourne were a cat lady, or if the Sandra Bullock vehicle “The Lost City” was less fun. He triangulates your expectations of him somewhere close and then lowers them even further.

Also on the plus side, it's a real pleasure to see Sam Rockwell on screen again, doing the Sam Rockwell thing (dancing, being casually charming, holding down the emotional center of this airless train wreck). Rockwell plays Aidan, a real, not fictional spy, who pulls Elly off a train on the way to his parents' house. He informs her that his wildly popular novels following the adventures of Agent Argylle (the aforementioned Henry Cavill) are eerily prescient about real-world espionage events.

Aidan is competing against the nefarious organization “Division” to capture Elly. Both want to discover their final chapter and the whereabouts of a hacker's microchip. What is in the microchip? It does not matter. What matters is that Elly learns to overcome his fear of flying, his anxious attachment to his cat Alfie, whom he carries in a backpack, her attempts to embrace his own power and, of course, dance with Sam Rockwell. The microchip is just the MacGuffin.

Now the bad news, which is many. The script, by Jason Fuchs, is overly repetitive and wordy in terms of exposition, and Vaughn doesn't bother with any “show, don't tell” visual storytelling, reserving his image-making for some wildly outlandish and silly action sequences. Of course, if you've seen a “Kingsman” movie, you'll know this is it, but with a lot more geysers of blood. Since “Argylle” is PG-13, everything is bloodless, tame and juvenile.

“But it's fiction,” one might argue, “it's supposed to be fantastic.” Yes and yes. But half the film is nonfiction: We can excuse the common-sense-defying action in sequences in which Henry Cavill and pop star Dua Lipa wreck their vehicles through a mountainous Greek town because that's what's in the movie. Elly page. You can see what they're going for when Cavill's Argylle starts mumbling about Elly's writer's block.

But the rest of the movie, in the “real world,” should seem more real, and none of this seems even remotely grounded. It seems like everyone is in this movie (Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Ariana DeBose, Catherine O'Hara, John Cena, Richard E. Grant) and yet there is no one in it. Each actor aside from Howard and Rockwell averages five minutes on screen, usually spent in some excessively cavernous room with two extras wandering around (the film was shot in June 2021 and it shows).

“Argylle” looks as flimsy and cheap as the hideous gold dress that poor Howard has to wear for the movie's third act (heinous crimes against costume design and hairstyling have been committed in this movie). The script and performances also offer us no emotional truth, aside from the absolutely Herculean effort Rockwell puts into it. He puts this thing on his back and carries it, bringing humor, heart and authentic emotion to his performance, even when Howard is spinning him around in a nondescript hallway filled with colored smoke. But one man can't do it alone, and “Argylle” fails despite Rockwell's engaging presence.

Vaughn leaves us with the vague threat that Agent Argylle will return in some form, but they have to start from page one if they want to make it worth watching, because this outing certainly isn't.

Katie Walsh is a film critic for the Tribune News Service.