A baffled Matthew Vaughn wonders why shooting someone in the head gives you an R rating

The Argylle director was "annoyed" by some of the cuts he had to make for the PG-13 rating

By Sam Barsanti  |  January 31, 2024 | 12:15am
Aux News Matthew Vaughn
A baffled Matthew Vaughn wonders why shooting someone in the head gives you an R rating
Matthew Vaughn Photo: Kate Green/Getty Images for Universal Pictures)

The world is going wild with big Argylle theories, with people questioning whether or not the author of the book is secretly Taylor Swift, whether or not the real Agent Argylle will be Taylor Swift, or whether or not Taylor Swift even exists, but director Matthew Vaughn just shared a little spoiler with Total Film when discussing the film’s PG-13 rating: Nobody gets shot in the head in Argylle. Not Henry Cavill, not Bryce Dallas Howard, not the real Agent Argylle, and not even Taylor Swift (because she’s probably not in the movie, unless she is).

The reason that everyone’s heads are safe is that you apparently can’t shoot someone in the head in a PG-13 movie, which Vaughn was so surprised by that it “sort of” made him laugh. He told Total Film that he had to make “a few little cuts” to make the movie PG-13 instead of R and he added that, “two of them annoyed the hell out of me.” He explained that someone getting shot in the chest won’t get you an R rating, saying that it’s “acceptable,” but then he doesn’t understand why getting shot in the head is so much worse. “If you’re gonna get shot,” he figures, “you’re gonna get shot.”

But that seems like a weird stance for Vaughn to take, since he has so much experience making violent action movies with the Kingsman series and Kick-Ass. He should know better than anyone that, in the language of action movies, a shot to the chest is completely different from a shot to the head. Shoot someone in the chest and they could just fall down, shoot someone in the head and you need VFX or makeup or something. It just seems weird for a guy who has made movies based around stylized violence to not realize that there’s a difference here!

In Vaughn’s defense, the reason he had a problem with this is that he didn’t want the movie to have the kind of tone that an R rating would bring, saying the rating should be “a reflection of what the film is” rather than making a movie just to get a specific rating. He wasn’t going for a R-rated vibe in Argylle, so he had to make these headshot cuts in order to not betray the tone of his movie.

 
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