"Once you know the secret, don’t let the cat out of the bag", declares the poster for Argylle, which front-and-centres the family cat belonging to director Matthew Vaughn and his wife Claudia Schiffer (to be fair, the cat does have more screen time than many of its purported stars).
In terms of figurative cats out of bags, the film is so giddy on twists – with a new one coming every few minutes – that when the Big Twist arrives it lands without much impact, especially since it's something of a cliché in the modern spy genre.
The fun to be had in Argylle is not through some Crying Game-style revelation but instead its hyperactive plot shifts, where allegiances shift, fantasy and reality is conflated and nothing is to be trusted. It is also the big problem.
The film spends so much time twisting and turning that it whips everything into a surprisingly unengaging froth, despite the best efforts of the likeable leads, Sam Rockwell and Bryce Dallas Howard. Ultimately, it lacks drama, suspense, and a bit of heart and soul.
The film begins with a sequence featuring Henry Cavill’s silly haircutted super-spy Argylle taking on Dua Lipa and assorted henchmen in a slo-mo fight scene to an unlikely song (a device that after Tarantino, Ritchie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vaughn’s other films, is now at a point where it feels lazy and not very cool anymore).
Given all the potential spoilers, it’s no great spoiler to say that this turns out to be a fictional sequence from the mind of Howard’s Elly Conway, the nerdish author of the Argylle series of books. (In a neat bit of promo, a real Argylle book was released in January, written under the name Elly Conway, with the rumour being that Taylor Swift was the real author – whoever in the marketing department came up with that rumour deserves a bonus.)
Conway is struggling with finding an end to her latest work. On her way to visit her mother, Ruth, (the always brilliant Catherine O’Hara), she finds herself under attack on a train, but is protected by an affable stranger Aidan (Rockwell). He turns out to be very handy in a slo-mo fight scene to an unlikely song, and not a stranger at all, but a real-life spy, just like Argylle. In the midst of the mayhem, Elly keeps blinking and seeing Cavill-as-Argylle talking to her. What does that mean? Is he real? Is Aidan? Is she? Is anything?
From there, the couple go on the run across Europe to try to find the truth, pursued by the head of an evil spy organisation played by Bryan Cranston. There are narrow escapes, more fight scenes, some interesting schizoid mirror chat with Argylle/Elly, lots of switching of allegiances and plot revelations, and appearances by a number of famous faces.
It's worth saying that most of these appearances are just cameos. The likes of John Cena, Ariana DeBose, Sofia Boutella, and Lipa, have precious little to do here. Cranston manages to make a lot of very little, too often left yelling at action played out on banks of screens in his bunker, as convention demands. Samuel L Jackson isn't quite so successful with his thin scenes, often simply watching a bank of screens in his respective bunker with only a bit of yelling to do.
On the plus side, Rockwell and Howard work well together, and somewhere in here there’s a cool Seventies-style double-hander, a Romancing the Stone meets The Bourne Identity, where there’s suspense and tension amid the laughs, helping you actually care about the characters and feel their peril.
But instead the film is content to amuse itself with increasingly silly sequences, including a particularly annoying dance-fight one, that take it into Austin Powers territory. Only, not funny.
What is a spy film without danger, sex or violence? Or rather, what is a spy film with a purely kitsch approach to these elements? Curiously inert. Once you’ve reached a point of maximum irony where nothing has value, as an audience you’re left unmoved.
I don’t say any of this out of spite, just disappointment. Obviously, no-one heads to a Matthew Vaughn film for a heavy meditation on the human condition, he is about Saturday night crowd-pleasing larks. Nothing wrong with that, and Vaughn should be commended for creating his own punky spy universe since 2014's Kingsman: The Secret Service.
But it would be nice to see the director stretch himself beyond these semi-spoof capers. Argylle lacks the edge of his early work like Layer Cake and Kick-Ass, and the marketing-first approach and corporate product placement (the film was part funded by Apple TV), make it feel as compromised as the Bond films it should be snottily subverting.
