Argylle (2024)

Matthew Vaughn's Argylle concerns Elly Conway, a reclusive spy novelist whose manuscripts keep predicting the movements of an actual criminal syndicate, a premise the film treats with the solemnity of a carnival funhouse. Bryce Dallas Howard anchors the proceedings, and the supporting roster includes Samuel L. Jackson, Ariana DeBose, Dua Lipa, and Sofia Boutella. The picture is diverse in the way a casting call is diverse, which is to say the faces are varied and the film has nothing whatsoever to say about it. Nobody remarks on anyone's background. Nobody gestures toward a larger social argument. The ensemble simply exists, professionally, in nice coats.

This is, on balance, a relief. The film offers no LGBTQ characters or themes, no engagement with racial questions, no environmental sermonizing, no economic critique of any kind. Its villains run a shadowy syndicate called the Division, headquartered on an oil tanker, and the screenplay regards that tanker as a location for a fistfight, not a metaphor. Howard's Elly is introverted and blocked, traits played strictly for laughs and never framed as neurodivergence. Her arc is a genre caper arc, all double identities and mind manipulation, and it stops well short of any feminist thesis. The cat, Alfie, is a cat.

Vaughn has built a twist machine that reviews its own twists with a smirk. Whatever progressive sensibilities surface here are incidental, the byproduct of hiring a broad cast in 2024 and letting them do stunts. The film lectures nobody. It has no message, no cause, no grievance. It has a runtime problem, a CGI problem, and a touching faith that audiences will forgive both. They largely did not, and the box office said as much in its opening weekend before the whole enterprise quietly retreated to streaming, where it presumably still smirks at us.

In the end, Argylle is a spy romp with a Scottish Fold cat and a mid-credits crossover tease, a film that aspires to nothing beyond its own convoluted pleasures. We classify it accordingly. It is not a text. It is a mood board with explosions, and there is a certain honesty in that.

{"thematic_tags": ["box_office_number_one"]}