It wasn’t until after I had seen Matthew Vaughn’s star-studded secret agent parody that I read the New Yorker feature explaining its premise and how it was conceived as the launch of a franchise—the creation of a hopefully lucrative IP. The article explained a lot of points in the story that made no sense to me while I was watching it, but I didn’t find the movie exciting or even funny enough to want to revisit it in order to understand what the producers were really trying to do. An entertainment such as this that can’t exist on its own as an integrated work—meaning it needs to be considered within some kind of imaginary context to be fully appreciated—doesn’t really stand a chance.

Ostensibly, the story is about a successful but cripplingly neurotic pulp spy novelist named Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who eventually comes to realize that the plots of her books follow actual events in the real world. The upshot is that a villainous organization helmed by a man named Ritter (Bryan Cranston) has decided that Elly has to be assasinated, but just as that plan is being carried out she is saved by a good guy spy with a disarmingly breezy attitude named Aidan (Sam Rockwell). As Aidan and Elly fall deeper into the intrigue of the chase, the fictional hero of Elly’s series, a Bond-type mannequin with an exaggerated buzz-cut and widow’s peak named Argylle (Henry Cavill) occasionally shows up in parallel universe mode to illustrate how his predicament mirrors Elly’s, but the script is so poorly structured that it’s often impossible to distinguish between what’s real—at least within the universe of the “movie”—and what’s the product of Elly’s imagination. As it turns out, this lack of differentiation is the core of the film’s high concept, but its immediate effect is total confusion, which makes everything around it a chore to keep up with. Argylle is a movie that constantly detours into new realities that have no coherence, even in relation to one another.

It also means the action, of which is there is plenty, has no real coherence either. Shoot-outs start and stop without reason; vehicular mayhem has no purchase on the viewer’s anxiety (Elly’s portable, mostly CGI cat, always contained in a bubble-backpack, is subjected to the most peril); and new characters working at cross-purposes through hackneyed double-crosses and playing both sides against each other keep popping up to further confound your grasp of what’s supposed to be going on. Since nothing is as it seems, there is no danger to get worried about—or involved in. Unlike me, moviegoers with a more acute sense of the logic that fuels most IP franchises may know what this is all leading to well before the so-called climactic reveal, but I wonder if they will feel compelled to follow it any further. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Argylle home page in Japanese

photo (c) Universal Pictures