As the 007 people show no urgency in getting their hero back on the screen we should not be surprised to see Matthew Vaughn – of the Bondish Kingsman films – step up to fill the increasingly conspicuous gap. Nobody should require smelling salts on seeing Henry Cavill having yet another crack at sending up those tropes. He did that in Mission: Impossible. He had a go in The Man from Uncle. Yes, Roger Moore spent much of the 1960s rehearsing Ian Fleming’s hero in The Saint, but Cavill, still a hopeful, may have already played out all the role’s possibilities.
Anyway, here he gets a chance to incorporate a pseudo-Bond within a dizzyingly busy metatext. We begin with the actor and his chiselled jaw, as the eponymous Agent Argylle, tracking down an evil Dua Lipa in picturesque Greece. John Cena is also on hand. Later Catherine O’Hara, Ariana DeBose, Sam Jackson, Bryan Cranston, Richard E Grant and Sofia Boutella join the party. Not since Michael Winner has a British director shown off such a swollen address book.
It soon transpires that Argylle is a fictional character in the books of Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard). After being saved from assassination by Sam Rockwell’s irreverent spy, the timid writer, who carries her cat everywhere in a backpack, is drawn into a complex conspiracy inspired by coincidences between her book’s plots and real-life skulduggery. Argylle, in the pleasing form of Cavill, remains a constant imagined companion.
We all know what Vaughn does. The film is all flash, all brass and all McGuffin. When every plot point is a heightened gag it proves hard to care about even the most allegedly momentous threat. There is far too much CGI. It goes on for half an hour longer than even the most tolerant Vaughn fan will allow.
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And yet. Howard is so irrepressibly charming that Argylle proves hard to wholly resist. Her inherent warmth and charm add interesting balance to the violence she ultimately gets to inflict on circling maniacs. One must also grudgingly acknowledge Vaughn’s dedication to an epic mayhem that strives towards a blend of Bollywood, Hong Kong action and Golden Age musical. The vast balletic fight to Leona Lewis’s version of Snow Patrol’s Run does not quite satisfy those ambitions. But it has a damn fine try.
