My World Of Flops: Argylle

My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.

Guy Ritchie sidekick turned comic book auteur Matthew Vaughn’s elephantine 2024 snoozer Argylle ends with a mid-credit sequence, bringing it into the Kingsman universe that he previously explored as the co-creator of the comic book series as well as the director of 2014’s Kingsmen: The Secret Service, 2017’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle and 2021’s The King’s Man. The idea was to whip public excitement for an Argylle/Kingsman crossover film into a frenzy, to have espionage movie fans salivating for another feature-length exploration of Argylle’s tacky, second-hand universe. 

The film closes with multiple confusing revelations designed to set up the next step in the Argylle saga, a reminder that Apple believed in Vaughn’s vision to a delusional extent. Rumors abounded that Argylle cost two hundred million dollars, or possibly even more. Vaughn shot down these rumors, telling Deadline, “I don’t know how you spend $200 million on it. I actually don’t. Unless you’re going to make a five-hour CG fest.”

That’s less false modesty than an honest assessment of a movie that looks like it cost a fraction of two hundred million dollars. Argylle did not cost two hundred million dollars. That’s what the suckers at Apple over-paid for it. They compounded their stupidity by spending a reported eighty million dollars to promote Argylle for a flop that tanked with critics and audiences alike. 

Somewhere, Steve Jobs’ ghost rages angrily against the company for foolishly spending its money. Apple went all-in on Argylle. It wasn’t just going to be a film so spectacularly successful that it would pay back its massive investment and then some. No, Argylle was going to be a multimedia extravaganza. It was going to be part of the Kingsman cinematic universe and extend Vaughn’s creative empire.

In the weeks leading up to the film’s release, a rumor, started perhaps by Apple’s marketing department, spread that Taylor Swift had written the novel that inspired the film under the pen name Elly Conway. This delusion was rooted in several references to argyle in Swift’s music and attire, as well as the popular musician owning the same breed of cat (Scottish Fold) as the film’s novelist heroine, Elly Conway. 

Like Donald Trump when he posted those sad AI images of Taylor Swift and her fans “endorsing” his presidential bid, Argylle merely wanted to harness the awesome power of Taylor Swift’s popularity and massive, devoted fanbase for its sinister purposes. Unfortunately for Apple and the filmmaker, Argylle’s connection to the hit-maker represented particularly ridiculous, easily disproved internet hype. If anything, Argylle feels so inconsequential that its lasting legacy will probably be as a silly footnote in Swift’s life and career rather than as the tentpole for a series of big-budget spy comedies.

In Argylle, Bryce Dallas Howard, an actress best known for running away from dinosaurs while wearing impractical footwear in the Jurassic World movies, stars as Elly Conway, a bestselling spy novelist. Readers go wild for Conway’s series of spy novels about Agent Argylle, but she’s a movie-world version of a sad, lonely single woman. This means that she’s gorgeous and rich, has a high-paying and glamorous job, and men throw themselves at her, but she comes home to an empty apartment, some half-finished wine, and her beloved cat Alfie. She professes to be in a relationship “with her work,” but that bond seems to be on the lukewarm side. 

Conway’s rigorously researched novels seemingly predict real-world events to an uncanny degree. That seems strange, considering that the glimpses we get into the world of Agent Argylle, pulp hero, boast as much gritty verisimilitude as the Austin Powers movies. 

Vaughn was excited to secure the services of Henry Cavill to play Agent Argylle in sequences dramatizing our heroine’s purple prose. He saw Cavill as Superman but also an off-brand James Bond, an eminently acceptable substitution for the real thing. Regrettably, Vaughn wildly overestimated Cavill’s charm and charisma. Like a towering tree, the Man Of Steel hunk is handsome and wooden—a square-jawed stiff.

Elly’s humdrum life as a rich, beautiful bestselling novelist gets turned upside-down by an encounter with Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell) on a train, where he uses his surprisingly advanced murder skills to fend off an ambush by an army of mysterious attackers. Aidan may be slight and unassuming, but he possesses Jason Bourne-level skills that he showcases in fight scenes set to upbeat pop songs. 

Rockwell steals Argylle, a misdemeanor at worst. Rockwell brings shaggy charisma to a thankless role. He’s easily the film’s strongest element but even his biggest fan would concede that spending between two hundred and three hundred million dollars on a movie starring Sam Rockwell and Clint Howard’s niece does not represent a safe or sound investment.

Aidan tells the confused and excited wordsmith that bad guys from a sinister secretive organization known as the Division are after her because of her seeming powers of prognostication and premonition. These heavies include Director Ritter (Bryan Cranston), a villain who has been posing as the heroine’s father. The role allows Cranston to channel his two most famous roles in Breaking Bad and Malcolm In The Middle as a bloodthirsty criminal who is also a dorky dad. Cranston delivers the same show-boating, scenery-chewing performance he’s been doing since Breaking Bad made him a superstar to diminishing returns. 

In a gloriously clumsy piece of exposition, Elly answers a question at a book signing, “I never had time to write until the skating accident, which I’ve obviously spoken about.” It’s then only a matter of time until her clumsily referenced skating prowess pays off in the third act with a flamboyant act of homicidal athleticism. 

Halfway through Argylle, Elly learns that her series of campy spy novels populated by broad caricatures and full of clichés ring true because in this world, somehow, they are true. 

Argylle ruined Argylle, as far as I am concerned, but if you don’t want the twist ruined, stop reading.

We learn that Elly previously lived a secret life as a top spy. Then she suffered a narratively convenient case of amnesia, at which point the Division brainwashed her into forgetting her real past and thinking that she’s a spy novelist rather than a spy. Elly’s books improbably, if not impossibly, read like cold, hard reality because they aren’t fictional; they’re expressions of her repressed memories, where elements of her past come out in scrambled form. 

Viewers with a sense of history might remember that as the twist in 1996’s underrated The Long Kiss Goodnight. With a single revelation, our heroine morphs from bookish to badass. Howard gives it her all, but she’s equally unconvincing as a frustrated novelist and distaff Jason Bourne/James Bond.

Argylle is also a descendant of Robert Zemeckis’ romantic adventure Romancing The Stone. The Reagan-era hit is strangely half-remembered today despite inspiring a whole subgenre of light comedies pairing mousy women with rugged male adventurers. Howard starts out playing Kathleen Turner’s role of the improbably lonely author before segueing into the Michael Douglas adventurer role following the big, inevitable, easy-to-predict twist.

A silly trifle executed with a self-satisfied smirk, Argylle runs an unconscionable 139 minutes when it has no excuse for lasting a minute over 90. Argylle lingers for so long that it feels like a feeble feature film and a sequel that nobody wanted. It takes chutzpah to waste nearly two and a half hours of your audience’s precious time, then insist that Argylle is just the beginning. 

Thankfully, Argylle represents an end as well as a beginning. Hopefully, Vaughn will take the hint and be satisfied with the sizable profit he made selling this overplotted and underwhelming misfire to Apple at a ridiculously inflated price. It’s never positive when a movie’s budget dominates the discourse about it rather than any creative considerations. However, Argylle represents such a feeble little nothing of a movie that its price tag remains its most interesting element. The fortune Apple paid for this turkey raises questions such as “Why?” “How could that make sense?” and “Is Argylle a money-laundering front for a drug cartel?” 

It does not help that Argylle sounds like the name of a PBS documentary about sweaters more than it does an outrageous spy comedy. In their ignorance and hubris, the filmmakers figured that moviegoers would fall so helplessly in love with these characters and their world that the simultaneously bland and confusing title wouldn’t matter. 

The movie ends by teasing the imminent release of Argylle Book One: The Movie, a film based on the fictional first book in a series by a fictional author as the centerpiece of a fictional universe. If Vaughn were to make that torturously titled motion picture, it would be less due to public demand than a stubborn refusal to concede that he erred in creating something that no one wanted in any form.

The universe soundly and correctly rejected Argylle. It consequently has little interest in sequels, follow-ups, spin-offs, prequels, tie-in novels, comic books, or television shows. Despite Vaughn’s plans, Argylle ended up just being a movie—and a flimsy and forgettable one at that. 

Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success: Failure