139 min | PG-13 | February 2, 2024 | Universal Pictures
Matthew Vaughn makes a spy movie about a spy novelist caught up in a real spy plot. Two hours and nineteen minutes of that. With a cat.
Elly Conway writes bestselling spy novels about a suave agent named Argylle. Then real spies show up because her fiction is somehow predicting actual intelligence operations. She gets swept into a globe-trotting adventure with a scruffy operative named Aidan and her cat Alfie. The premise has a Romancing the Stone energy that the film buries under layers of twists and CGI and a runtime that no comedy-action hybrid should ever attempt.
Bryce Dallas Howard plays Elly with committed bewilderment. She is doing her best. Sam Rockwell plays Aidan with the charm he brings to everything and the material gives him nothing to do with it. Henry Cavill plays the fictional Argylle in sequences that look expensive and feel weightless. Bryan Cranston plays a villain. Catherine O’Hara plays Elly’s mother. The cast is stacked with talent that the script treats as set dressing for its plot machinery.
Matthew Vaughn made Kingsman by taking spy movie tropes and pushing them into absurdist violence with style and wit. He tries the same trick here and it does not work. The action sequences are overproduced. The twists pile up until they cancel each other out. The film has at least three endings. The CGI cat is a choice that announces itself as cute and becomes grating. The tone lurches between sincerity and self-aware comedy without committing to either. At two hours and nineteen minutes, the film is at least forty minutes too long.
Apple reportedly spent over two hundred million dollars on this. That money is on screen in the form of locations and stars and visual effects. None of it is on screen in the form of a coherent film. Vaughn has made a movie that mistakes complication for cleverness and spectacle for entertainment.