Argylle review: Matthew Vaughn's meta-spy action comedy is overstuffed and exhausting

There’s a blinking humor laced throughout Matthew Vaughn’s latest spy action comedy, Argylle. Not winking—although, there are moments when it playfully nudges us to scoff and marvel at its own knowingness—but blinking. As in, blinking becomes a key way in which the film telegraphs some of its most presumably hilarious moments: one moment you see the setup of a visual gag, and then blink you see its punchline. Used once it’s a great gimmick, but as with all things Argylle, such comedic mechanics are used and overused ad nauseam, to the point that they start losing their impact.

The one doing the blinking throughout the film is Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a dowdy, skittish author (is there any other kind in films like these?). She’s the bestselling writer of a series of spy novels centered on Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill, donning a ridiculous haircut and one of the most ill-fitting costumes he’s yet to wear on screen). Throughout four books she’s managed to turn this suave spy into a modern-day Bond, and everyone—including her adoring mother (Catherine O’Hara, brilliant as ever)—is eager to find out what’s gonna happen in her next book. Will Argylle be able to take down the evil counterspy operation that’s been wreaking havoc all over and which he’s since learned involves those at the top of his very own agency? Will he be able to retrieve the key (encoded and in the hands of a hacker, of course) to all such intel in time to bring it all down?

But Elly is suffering from writer’s block and so, in a fit of inspiration, she decides to pack her stuff and her cat, Alfie, and take a train to see mom. Maybe she needs time away from her desk to better focus on these stories which, she insists to her readers, flow through her as if they were already there to be plucked.

But that train ride only brings her grief. She fumbles a flirting situation and then finds herself sitting across from a long-haired bearded doofus of a guy (Sam Rockwell’s Aidan) who, surprise, is reading her latest book. But that’s not all. He then tells her he’s a secret agent tasked with keeping her safe (trust him, he insists) and that she shouldn’t be spooked when everyone on the train (looking like normal folks; not like her Argylle) starts going after her.

That’s when the blinking starts. For no sooner has Aidan said all this than she begins seeing Aidan and Argylle interchangeably as he (they?) fends off a swarm of baddies who clearly want to kidnap Elly: it seems her books aren’t so much fiction after all. In these kinds of action sequences, Vaughn’s child-like glee for choreographed fights is clear. In the confines of an Amtrak train, the writer-director responsible for Kick-Ass and the Kingsman franchise really comes alive. Rockwell’s Aidan is clearly a well-trained spy, using everything from Elly’s book to restroom doors to fend off and neutralize those goons going after Elly, only Elly sees not Aidan but Argylle, which makes for some fun moments. Aidan is often capable but graceless, but in the blink of an eye, Elly sees instead how Argylle would dispose of these threats more elegantly. Elly rightly believes she’s losing her mind, but it’s enjoyable to go back and forth (blinking in and out of) those Aidan/Argylle moments.

And therein lies the setup of Argylle: fact and fiction will be thenceforth intertwined. Thus, as Elly and Aidan try to write Elly’s next chapter—namely, try to figure out what actually happened to the real-life spy who, like his fictional counterpart, had uncovered a far-reaching conspiracy—Vaughn launches them into a series of globe-trotting misadventures that will test whether Argylle’s tagline (“The greater the spy, the bigger the lie”) is more than just a great marketing hook. Can Elly really trust what Aidan is telling her? Can she really be safe while in the midst of a spy vs. spy operation where lying and backstabbing are but par for the course? And, more importantly, will her beloved cat Alfie be able to survive this entire ordeal?

Given how closely Argylle hews to playfully toying with spy genre tropes, some of the many (oh so many!) twists it stages are best left unspoiled, even if they are, at times, easily anticipated. And for the most part, Vaughn mounts some aptly enjoyable set pieces that keep the film from feeling too self-serious, a key ingredient if you’re going to spoof this genre. Indeed, there are two fight sequences at the end of the film—one riffing on a dance duet, the other an ice skating routine—that are so delightfully bonkers you can’t help but grin along enough to ward off the cringe you’d otherwise be feeling. Even still, Vaughn’s overuse of disco and pop songs throughout to score cartoonishly violent sequences eventually wears out its welcome, emerging (like those blinking moments) as audiovisual crutches meant to telegraph what’s funny rather than letting said moments be funny instead.

At least Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell, as the unlikeliest spy action duo, are having a great time. As are most of the film’s cast. Cavill, in particular, getting to mock the kind of square-jawed, unflappable spies that often adorn this kind of film, plays his role with gusto, while the likes of Samuel L. Jackson, Bryan Cranston, and John Cena all dutifully hit their marks and offer variations on the types of roles they’d be expected to play in a spy flick like this. For, at times, Argylle does feel more like a writerly exercise in how to pen a spy caper in the 21st century, when self-deprecating irony itself needs to be offered up within quotation marks, finely straddling the line between an earnest laugh and a sardonic stare. In trying to do both—in trying to play it straight and yet show the very absurd mechanics of what it means to do so—Argylle lands in a kind of exhausting limbo, forever stretching its premise to its breaking point only to snap it back up again. All within the blink of an eye.

Argylle opens in theaters February 2