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From Director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter Jason Fuchs comes the action/comedy spy flick Argylle.

Apple Films

Ellie Conway (Brice Dallas Howard) author of a series of very successful spy novel featured super spy Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) finds herself perused by assassins because her novels have been recounting actual events and missions and now a shadowy agency believes that she has the key to locating the story McGuffin. A lone agent Aiden Wilde (Sam Rockwell) attempts to protector her and find the McGuffin in time to win the day.

Argylle starts off in the fictional world of Elle’s novel with vastly exaggerated action and daring feats in theory setting up a dual setting for the film, the over-the-top world of Elle’s imagination and a more grounded reality if her life. This is not what happens the ‘real’ world that Elle’s inhabits is just as exaggerated and requires the same impossible suspension of disbelief as the adventures of Agent Argylle requires.  At one point as we watched the movie at home I turned to my sweetie-wife and said that I missed the grounded realism of Marvel’s Black Widow. (Which we watched the next night as a palate cleanser.)

Despite having a number of cast member that I truly love watching, Bryan Cranston, Sam Rockwell, Samuel L Jackson, and the incomparable Catherine O’Hara, Argylle with is inconsistent tone, contradictory plot and story lines, proved to be a slog to watch. The production design made no distinction between Elle’s imagined events and the supposedly real ones giving the entire movie a sameness that served no purpose. A number of the settings were crafted from CGI and not actual location but with a level of artificiality that created a ‘uncanny valley’ when looking at valleys and not just people.

I can find nothing to recommend in Argylle and it pleases me that my sweetie-wife made the call that we waited until streaming to watch this piece of dreck.

Argylle, should you wish to torture yourself, is streaming on Apple TV+.