Jason Fuchs but his script doesn't: Argylle, failure, and spy parody

I came away from Argylle having had all my expectations shattered. And, to be fair, they were not good expectations. When I saw Henry Cavill was starring in a Matthew Vaughn spy movie, I was certain that his not-really-his-daddy issues over Robert Vaughn which had clearly inspired elements of Kingsman: The Secret Service would take centre stage – Cavill played Napoleon Solo, the role for which Robert Vaughn was famous, in the 2015 Guy Ritchie Man from UNCLE attempted reboot. And while this makes for a movie that leaves a lot to be desired, I can’t blame a man who spent his twenties believing his father was Napoleon Solo for making middling spy movies fixated on this fact.

When the middling spy movies are bad for unrelated reasons, I become apoplectic.

Argylle begins with a classic pastiche of the spy genre. The titular superspy, with an absurd haircut and green velvet suit, meets Dua Lipa in a club in Greece, they dance sexually but not erotically, she betrays him, he escapes, his accomplice in escaping is killed, John Cena snatches the femme fatale off a motorcycle, they discover their bosses betrayed them to her. At this point I could get into it, knowing this was the fiction within the fiction: the spy novel written by our true protagonist, Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly Conway. The over-the-top parody fits, and it is at this point that I do a dangerous thing, I develop hope for this picture.

This movie does not fulfill that hope.

Elly Conway, our meek cat-loving novelist protagonist, has just finished the manuscript for her fifth Argylle novel (I have not, at present, read the tie-in novel for the movie). At her mother’s insistence, she reluctantly visits her family to punch it up and avoid a cliffhanger ending. When she is protected from assassination on the train by the rogue spy Aidan (Sam Rockwell), she gets pulled into a game of cat and mouse with the villainous Division, racing for the macguffinous Master Key. As it turns out, her four published Argylle novels closely follow a real series of covert operations, and the conclusion following the fifth’s cliffhanger ending is the secret to finding the real Master Key. About halfway through the movie she discovers that she is actually secret agent Rachel Kylle (R. Kylle → Argylle), and her novels are actually memories of her own missions. Five years previous, shortly after the cliffhanger ending of the Book Five manuscript, she entered a coma, and as she recovered was brainwashed by Division director Ritter (Bryan Cranston) and ‘Director of Psyops’ Margaret Vogler¹ (Catherine O’Hara), who pose as her suburban white American parents, Barry and Ruth.

I have some admittedly nitpicky problems with this – in an early scene, she is asked how she managed to predict real world events, all of which would have occurred when she was a spy, and before she was writing Argylle novels. There are other logistical details – why have the Division done no other investigations into the whereabouts of this all important USB in the last 5 years, why do the Division, who seem to have infinite manpower (Vaughn loves a fight scene with dozens of goons), not simply storm the secret keeper’s compound. The script feels unfinished: for instance, the diegetic Argylle novels do not have individual names, just ‘Book [number]’, and it feels like that was meant to be filled in later, but they never got around to it. There are many technical failings in this movie but my main problem with it is its failure to interrogate it’s own assumptions about the world, and how it runs away from the most interesting implications of its premise.

Argylle is terrified of Gender.

It’s surprising, for a movie wherein a woman externalises her memories as belonging to Henry Cavill in a velvet suit and appalling crew cut, acting like he asked Matthew Vaughn to do for him what Layer Cake did for Daniel Craig². But this movie seems to tremble at the thought of it. When Aidan first appears onscreen, he wears a long shaggy beard and lampshades Cavill’s look, pointing out that real spies deliberately don’t draw attention to themselves. It works in the scene – Sam Rockwell is, somehow, a very nondescript man – and he’s right, of course, but the movie has to have its cake and eat it too.

When Alfie (Samuel L Jackson) suggests that if she can’t be the real Rachel Kylle right now, she and Aidan should at least “dress the fantasy”, Rachel/Elly is already established as the real Argylle and Aidan as the real Wyatt (John Cena). It follows that the costumes should be Rachel in a green velvet suit, and Aidan in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants. Instead, Aidan wears the green velvet suit, and Rachel wears the gold, cleavagey dress and stiletto heels of Dua Lipa’s LaGrange, someone Argylle seems to have known for less than half an hour from first sight to her death. She will be wearing this outfit throughout the climactic fight scenes (she eventually ditches the heels for practical boots, but continues to wear a midi-length dress).

Incidentally, Howard’s act three look is very poorly executed – it’s modelled after Dua Lipa’s outfit in the first scene, and the two women have very different builds, which resulted in giving Howard a much longer dress that is also quite poorly tailored to her. The raccoon-eye makeup and platinum blonde hair also don’t work for her and it’s a bizarre decision to style her that way, especially with the lack of strong plot reasoning. This is made more egregious by a handful of flashback shots and background photos of Rachel in a version of the velvet suit, her hair tied into a practical style. This version, however, is never allowed to exist for a full scene, nor is it the version that represents her return to spycraft. There is something that drives me apoplectic with rage about joking about how attention grabbing and bad for spying a male model with a chiselled jawline is, and then putting your female lead spy in heels. It seems like Fuchs and Vaughn realised they wrote their way into a cool butch woman, and felt a desperate need to backpedal.

And speaking of approaching lesbianism and rapidly backpedalling…

Rachel is bisexual. This is easy to miss, I suspect on purpose. But the two early scenes of Argylle flirting with women are implicitly from Rachel’s past, and an offhand line implies a sexual history with confused orientalist stereotype the Secret Keeper³. In a better movie this would have been an interesting aspect of a character. In a better movie Rachel may have had a reaction to discovering that in a past life she no longer remembers, she was sexually active with other women. In this movie we attend the Atomic Blonde school of femmes fatales are bisexual inasmuch as this titillates a male audience.

This movie is always glancing off queerness, never hitting it straight on. Elly’s epilogue speech on the outcomes for the leading cast stresses the importance of Argylle and Wyatt’s partnership, and the fact that she has just heavily implied her ultra-masculine superspy protagonist is gay or bisexual is unremarked upon by her audience. It’s as if they know she is really referring to herself, and that it was the unremarkably heterosexual pairing of Aidan and Rachel that rode off into the sunset with Keira.

Wait, who?

Keira (Ariana DeBose), who it should be impossible to have elided for this much of a review, is the third agent in the field team. She is also a queer-coded woman of colour, played by a queer actress. She is killed off in the opening sequence, before having her return from the dead be all but announced at the midway point, and then saving the day in the last moments of the film. It’s a small role, but DeBose plays what little she’s given well, in the (discounting incessant flashbacks) about 5 minutes of screen time she gets.

And the flashbacks are incessant. Matthew Vaughn seems to think the viewer will forget the start of his movie by the hour mark, and as the movie goes on the repeated shots become extremely grating. These are for the most minor of inferences, even just to remind the viewer how much Aiden and Elly have gone through the past few days, as if we have not just watched them go through it. Some movies can only be appreciated in a theatre, no TV can get the experience right. This movie can only be appreciated at home, as it is rude to be on your phone in a cinema. There’s also a problem where some shots have a fisheye effect seemingly at random; I am not sure if this is an error of cinematography or editing but in either case it is inconsistent, jarring, and bad. Slow motion is also used to excess, particularly in the scene where it is revealed that Elly’s ‘father’ is in fact Division head Ritter (Bryan Cranston). To say that this movie is over-edited is like calling tartare ‘a bit rare’. Sometimes it almost pays off, other times it comes off like the climactic fight scene set on the album art of Lover.

And the fight scenes. I understand the only way Matthew Vaughn can demonstrate that someone is cool is by having them fight off several people and sustain no injuries. I understand that ‘our heroes blast through dozens of goons’ is de rigueur. But it’s so excessive. It ruins all sense of threat when there are at least 15 distinct goons in the first fight scene, and then 15 minutes later vanful after vanful arrives at Next Location. When Aidan, and later Rachel, can win fight after fight against dozens of enemies, I can’t help but wonder why I’m meant to feel any sense of danger or tension.

I don’t doubt that Matthew Vaughn likes spy movies and has the background to pastiche effectively. Kingsman, for instance was filled with references to the classics, from the discussion between Galahad and Valentine about charismatic Bond villains to the secret tailor-shop base lifted directly from The Man From UNCLE. And I can see little references here and there. Argylle’s velvet suit seems very Austin Powers, Ritter’s wood-panelled office on a cargo ship is reminiscent of M’s duplicate office on a submarine in You Only Live Twice. There is a Ken Adam feel to the third-act set of the Division’s mobile naval base. But what made those final confrontations in Bond movies tense was that he was badly outnumbered unless helped. In the field in the first two acts assassins would come one or two at a time and still prove dangerous threats, and that made the threat of a base full of goons real.

These fight scenes are just noise, you can’t suspend disbelief enough to believe anything could happen to the heroes. I realise this is a comedy but these fight scenes are not played for laughs either. They need to be good. They need to hold tension. They need to convince the audience that the hero’s victory is not guaranteed. And only the climactic one-on-one fight between a brainwashed Rachel and Aiden ever did.

There were strong points to this movie. In the opening, LaGrange challenges Argylle to ‘dance as well as you dress’. His response is to lift her so she is seated with one leg outstretched across each of his shoulders, her crotch in his face, at which point he just starts rotating in place. They call it the whirly-bird and it is hilariously bad the first time, somewhat ludicrous the second, and obnoxious the third, during the aforementioned Lover cover brawl. At least Fuchs knows to set up, remind, and pay off. Bryan Cranston as Ritter delivers a pitch perfect ‘villain killing an incompetent minion’ scene, straight out of a Connery or Moore Bond. I think most of the all-star cast deliver strong performances, but are hampered by being put in this over-edited schlock.

This movie is not good. Many of my friends told me to see it. Me specifically, that is, because I am known as an enjoyer, a connoisseur, of bad spy movies. They did not tell their other friends to see it, because it is bad. They were right to do this. I do feel bad for the cast, each of whom clearly put a lot of effort into the roles they were given and did their best to bring to life. They did well. But these performances fail to shine through such a shitshow of a production.

1. This movie does not know what a psyop is.

2. That is, to demonstrate his capacity to play the next James Bond.

3. A woman who keeps information and safety deposit boxes for spies in a compound in Saudi Arabia because of her specific interpretation of Islam. That’s neither a joke nor an exaggeration.