Some movies are bad because they're made by bean counters, but Argylle is clearly the distinctive vision of director Matthew Vaughn. Unfortunately, it's a really annoying vision.
The movie starts off well enough - sure, the look is the lowest of low budget action but it moves pretty well. It's a prologue to the actual story about a spy novelist and her uncanny-valley cat.
If you watch the trailer, you can get a good idea of how this movie could have been done. There's an action scene on a train that looks entertaining, and would, in fact, have been entertaining if Vaughn didn't do this confused multiple-reality thing (that the trailer editor wisely left out). A little of that might have worked, but there's a LOT of it, and in the next action scene, there's a lot more.
The movie also almost immediately doesn't make sense. I don't just mean the central premise, which is actually appealingly kooky. I mean that the spy is really just horrendously bad at all aspects of the job except fighting, which is weird. And the way he connects with the writer is inexplicable. And the bad guys are - I don't know what was going on there.
Anyway, I gave up around the "why aren't you crushing skulls" part of the movie, but I looked up the plot in wikipedia and it seems that the nonsense I saw is the least nonsensical part of the movie.
The cast is pretty good. There is clearly enough material to get a good trailer out of this. But ultimately this is just a disaster.
The movie starts off well enough - sure, the look is the lowest of low budget action but it moves pretty well. It's a prologue to the actual story about a spy novelist and her uncanny-valley cat.
If you watch the trailer, you can get a good idea of how this movie could have been done. There's an action scene on a train that looks entertaining, and would, in fact, have been entertaining if Vaughn didn't do this confused multiple-reality thing (that the trailer editor wisely left out). A little of that might have worked, but there's a LOT of it, and in the next action scene, there's a lot more.
The movie also almost immediately doesn't make sense. I don't just mean the central premise, which is actually appealingly kooky. I mean that the spy is really just horrendously bad at all aspects of the job except fighting, which is weird. And the way he connects with the writer is inexplicable. And the bad guys are - I don't know what was going on there.
Anyway, I gave up around the "why aren't you crushing skulls" part of the movie, but I looked up the plot in wikipedia and it seems that the nonsense I saw is the least nonsensical part of the movie.
The cast is pretty good. There is clearly enough material to get a good trailer out of this. But ultimately this is just a disaster.