Argylle

“Argylle hypersexualizes most of its female spies and barely remembers to include characters of color, all of them tokenized.”

Title: Argylle (2024)
Director: Matthew Vaughn 👨🏼🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
Writer: Jason Fuchs 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 1.5/5

From the jump, director Matthew Vaughn’s (Kingsman, Kick-Ass) Argylle explodes into a fizz-bang ball of inanity. But as juvenile humor and groan-worthy puns coat every spit-shined surface, and plot points reach for spy tropes over and over again—not for the sake of spoofing, but as devices laying around for Vaughn and writer Jason Fuchs to pluck and rehash—the movie feels lazily written, almost incidental. A downloading bar stuck at 94%? Check. A speedboat getaway? Check. Main leads trapped on a rooftop, memory loss, and mind control? Check, check, and check. This isn’t satire, folks. It’s just painfully predictable.

With a meandering plot that feels about as intentional as a series of improv sketches, Argylle whirls with empty theatrics. A campy handheld camera that dizzyingly moves around is supposed to make up for blocky, uninteresting fight choreography—a surprising disappointment, given the exciting action Vaughn’s become known for. Nor can Argylle boast visual splendor; fake-looking backdrops seem to place actors into a permanent green room, while obvious 3D renderings of cars, explosions, and sometimes people add to the sense of watching a cheap, live action cartoon. Finally, a too-long runtime woefully sags in the middle, eliciting drooping eyelids and mid-movie yawns. Without anything to sink your teeth into, there’s just not a great reason to watch Argylle at home, much less in theaters.

Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Although the film does have a female lead, spy novelist Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), Elly spends most of the film utterly powerless—whimpering, scared, and anxious, passing out multiple times.

Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly Conway in *Argylle*, directed by Matthew Vaughn

She does eventually scrabble together a bit of agency, but for the most part, she’s a hollow vessel who listens wide-eyed to the people around her. In particular, love interest Aidan (Sam Rockwell) drags Elly into his chaotic life of espionage, teaching her to become the best version of herself. (Cue groan.) Furthermore, Hollywood consistently pairs significantly older men with younger women, and Argylle falls into that cliche with Howard (42) 13 years younger than Rockwell (55) at the time of the film’s release.

Neither does Elly have any real connections with other women. Her mother, played by scene-stealer Catherine O'Hara, is at first supportive of her daughter, but later reveals herself to be unreliable. In minor roles, Sofia Boutella reprises her usual slinky, tall-dark-and-sexy persona (see: Kingsman: The Secret Service, The Mummy), playing an underworld mercenary who trades intel for power. And in the film’s most depressing role for a woman, Dua Lipa’s forced to lean into the demeaning Bond girl trope. To be fair, the campy character is intentionally ridiculous, crafted as an empty assemblage of come-hither stares and innuendo-laced lines. But there’s nothing empowering, or even funny, about watching a hypersexualized woman ramped up to a hundred. It just feels gross.

Lagrange (Dua Lipa) and Argylle (Henry Cavill) in *Argylle*, directed by Matthew Vaughn.

Race: 2/5

The film cedes its screentime to almost entirely white actors such as Howard, Rockwell, Henry Cavill as Elly’s fictional hero Argylle, O’Hara, and Bryan Cranston as a bland villain. In minor roles, Samuel L. Jackson plays a seldom-seen CIA director, reminiscent of so many other tokenized Black characters in supposed positions of power who defer to white protagonists to save the day. French Algerian actor Boutella appears in the generically labeled “Arabian Peninsula” scenes—a contrast to other regions labeled by their country (“Greece”) or city (“London”). Ariana DeBose gets positive but scant scenes as a tech-savvy spy, and London-born Albanian singer Dua Lipa has the aforementioned lackluster role as a sexpot caricature. The racial diversity is present, just not in any meaningful way.

Bonus for Body Diversity: +0.75

The only area of inclusion where Argylle succeeds is with the centering of a female action hero, Elly, who doesn’t fit the cookie-cutter mold of being thin as a rail. (See: Atomic Blonde’s Charlize Theron, Red Sparrow’s Jennifer Lawrence, Jennifer Garner in TV series Alias—the list goes on.) The movie does undercut its own positive casting by having every other nameless, gun-toting female spy fall into this exact body shape, but the slightly bigger Elly gets by far the most screen time. It’s refreshing to watch as Elly confidently runs, jumps, and—memorably—spins around on deadly makeshift ice skates, and it’s even more empowering to know that prior to the movie’s production, Howard advocated for herself. She says to Time: “I straight up said to Matthew [Vaughn], ‘I just want you to know that this is my body. And if you want my body to be smaller, I think you should hire someone else.’” It’s dispiriting that someone as beautiful and thin as Howard even needs to have that conversation, but nonetheless, Vaughn made the right decision—Howard’s casting is one of the film’s few bright spots.

Mediaversity Grade: D 2.42/5

Even if Argylle does have a female lead who has a slightly bigger body than the usual female action hero, it fails in almost every other area of inclusiveness (and, well, general merit). With writing and direction you could easily mistake for a 10-year-old boy’s fever dream, the film hypersexualizes most of its female spies and barely remembers to include characters of color, all of them tokenized. Sure, plenty of people may well enjoy this lighthearted, don’t-you-dare-take-me-seriously fare. But it could’ve been silly and inclusive without much effort at all.

Like Argylle? Try these other campy spy flicks.

Grade: DLiFebruary 5, 2024Great for: Body Diversity