Spoiler Space: Let’s talk about that Argylle twist
We need to discuss what works and what doesn't in Matthew Vaughn's bonkers action-comedy-spy caper
Film Features Argylle
Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review. Fair warning: This piece discusses certain surprises that will spoil Argylle for those who haven’t seen it.
Before we get into the spoilers, let’s spare a moment to think of the poor marketing team tasked with selling Argylle to the public, for theirs was not an easy task. We can’t even discuss the film fully without revealing some of the surprises, so we get that it might have been a challenge to promote in a way that lets people know what they’re in for while keeping certain things under wraps. Ever since the first trailer advised viewers not to “let the cat out of the bag” once they knew the “secret,” there’s been plenty of speculation about the identity of Argylle. We don’t blame whoever it was that came up with the idea of making it seem like the titular super spy might be a literal cat. It’s not their fault that it happens to be a much more interesting twist than the one that’s actually in the movie.
Now that Argylle is in theaters and audiences have had a chance to see it, we thought we’d talk about not only that twist but all the other insane things that happen in the film. If you’ve read this far you probably fall into one of two camps: either you’ve already seen the movie and know by now that Agent Argylle isn’t, in fact, the cat, or you haven’t and didn’t know that, but you don’t care whether it spoils anything. Sometimes you’ve just gotta satisfy your cat-like curiosity, and we respect that.
As for Argylle’s identity, if you predicted that Elly (Bryce Dallas Howard) would be a victim of some fancy brainwashing technique to make her forget her former life of espionage, not to mention her entire personality, you might also be a super spy. Because who could see that coming? The more you think about it, the less it makes sense. And the more likely it is that you’ve thought about it more than writer Jason Fuchs or director Matthew Vaughn (or even the pseudonymous author of the novel it’s based on, who is definitely not Taylor Swift). Argylle has some fun moments, and the first half or so is enjoyable, but when a whole film is built upon an ultimately unsuccessful twist, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.
One of the big reasons the twist doesn’t work comes down to Howard herself. It’s not her fault she was miscast in a challenging dual role. She’s lovely as meek, introverted Elly Conway, who just wants to be alone in her lake house with her cat and her fictional (or so she thinks) characters. It’s when she has to flip the switch and become hardass double agent (or triple agent? It’s hard to keep track) Rachel Kyle that things get dicey. It’s never convincing. She also has more romantic chemistry with Sam Rockwell’s Aidan when she’s in Elly mode, in spite of the fact that it’s Rachel who’s supposed to be his real love interest. You can’t just put a gun in someone’s hand, some curse words in their mouth, dress them up in a blonde wig and a slinky, low-cut dress and expect us to buy them as a steely action hero. It takes a physicality and an attitude to pull off the kind of balletic action scenes Vaughn loves to stage, and Howard unfortunately makes it look like a lot of hard work.
Howard’s limitations aren’t the only problem with the twist, though. From a narrative standpoint, it makes zero sense. Even if we can accept that such an elaborate brainwashing scheme would actually work, and considering that spy films often rely on the fantastical that’s not too tough an ask, the plan has some major flaws. Why would Ritter (Bryan Cranston) and Catherine O’Hara’s evil psychologist (who is British? for some reason?) go to the trouble of creating this elaborate fabrication of a life in order to get Rachel, as Elly, to write the final chapter of a five-book series, as a long con to find out the location of the MacGuffin File (that’s what we’re calling it anyway)? Wouldn’t it have been much easier to preserve her identity, gain her trust, and get her to tell them literally any other way? She thought they were her parents! She would have just told them if they’d asked.
Instead, they encourage her to reveal their secrets to the world in the Argylle novels. Which turn out to be instant bestsellers, because in addition to being an elite spy, Rachel Kyle apparently also has what it takes to become a successful writer. It’s just that easy. Of course, to most readers they’re pure fiction, but it seems like a serious security breach for a community that relies on keeping secrets to let them out there into the public in any form. Especially if they all read Elly’s books, as the script repeatedly reminds us they do. The only reason for it to play out like it does is that the movie really wants her to be a bestselling author at the beginning. That’s it.
If the twist were handled better, Argylle might be able to sustain some of the other flights of fancy and lapses in logic that threaten to bring it down. We might be able to forgive the fact that Dua Lipa dies in the first five minutes, or that Henry Cavill (Rachel’s fictional alter ego) and John Cena (Aidan’s fictional alter ego) don’t get anything close to the relationship Rachel and Aidan have (let them kiss!), or that it criminally wastes actors like Ariana DeBose and Samuel L. Jackson, who was paid to basically sit at a desk and watch Laker games. They couldn’t even get the CGI cat right. Which really should have been the first tip-off that it was never going to be about the cat. We can only hope someone actually does make that movie someday.
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All they had to do was *not talk about a twist at all*. I guess they never considered not putting that idea in potential audiences’ heads.Insert enough snippets of Cavill’s fictional agent into the trailer and no one would have known better.
Wouldn’t be surprised if some Hollywood executive thought mentioning the twist would get people to see it in theaters… forgetting that hours after it premiers in a public theater people would post the twist.I was going to see it anyway because Sam Rockwell is always enjoyable. Nowadays, I’ll watch just the teaser since they mostly don’t give away the plot.Mostly.
Yeah this just seems like a plot point. Unless it’s like a full-on Sixth Sense-level twist that truly changes everything that’s come before, marketing it as some sort of mind-bender seems like a bad idea once people have actually seen it.
Sometimes marketing is the worst thing that can happen to a movie.
They did, didn’t they? There’s a shot of him turning back to the camera and winking while on a boat that’s been in every trailer and TV spot I’ve seen. The marketing made such a huge deal about his identity so I assumed it was someone else, or that it was an intentional redirect. I actually thought it might be Taylor Swift given all the noise about her potentially being the “real” Elly Conway (who doesn’t exist at all despite what the filmmakers have told the public).
They had that and a clearly manufactured “Who is the author?” social media campaign where I am 100% someone in the marketing team started the “Its Taylor Swift” rumor
So basically this 2024 film is really just a ripoff of Philip K. Dick’s We can Remember it for you Wholesale which was the basis for 1990’s Total Recall, which already had a totally crappy and unnecessary remake?!?!?I glad I didn’t waste 2+ hours of my life on this regurgitated pile of shite.
When another decent spy movie with Cavill would have been perfectly fine I’m sure.
Reminds me more of The Long Kiss Goodnight.
Looks to be heading towards similar box office success.
From the blond hair-dyeing, through wise-cracking Jackson, right down to the ice-skating – which, by the way Vaughn, THAT’S NOT HOW ICE-SKATING WORKS. I realise that’s a weird inaccuracy to fixate on, in a movie this unconcerned with any rules of physics, chemistry, geography, or basic narrative, but goddamn, it annoyed me.
You mean “That’s not how ice skating through oil works!”It’s a viscous fluid damn it… (And not even the worst CGI in the movie!)
Which also had Samuel L Jackson in it. Coincidence???(yes, probably)
‘”Which also had Samuel L Jackson in it. Coincidence???(yes, probably)“’I don’t think so. It’s deliberate casting. But also the name of the pub in King’s Man: Secret Service is Black Prince. But it’s obvious they want people to checkout King’s Man: Secret Service due to that stinger.
I’ll take a hard bet that Samuel L Jackson’s performance in Long Kiss Goodnight is the better performance though. That film is such an underrated gem.
Well, he’s essentially second billing, and thus has plenty to do in it, as opposed to this movie, where it sounds like he had half a day’s worth of easy work (and nothing wrong with that of course).
I only saw Long Kiss Goodnight last year. A 90s movie in all the best and worst senses.
Oh no, I mostly wanted to just re-iterate the joys of an underrated gem.Yeah TLKG is hardly Best Picture but it takes a cliche central premise and really runs with it. SLJ made some very high quality “low brow” action fare in that period that really set him up for life.
Which, Mr Kinsey, is a woefully underrated film from a by-gone era of simple, no-nonsense, action films.
Yeah. It’s a good flick.
The large-scale deception to trick someone into revealing a deep secret was handled much better in 36 Hours.
Or “The Long Kiss Goodnight” with a dash of “Romancing the Stone”
“Spy with amnesia” is a trope that is basically a cliche at this point – in addition to Long Kiss Goodnight, there’s the whole Bourne Identity franchise. Rarely has it been done as poorly as in Argylle though!
the “twist” was spoiled when Variety or whomever first announced this movie was in the works with “Matthew Vaughan directing new film about spy with amnesia who writes novels based on her own experiences.”
I definitely would love to see their synopsis of Citizen Kane : “Charles Foster Kane, formerly beloved wealthy recluse, reminisces about his childhood sled in his dying moments.” or Fight Club: “Jack and his hallucinated alter-ego Tyler Durden continue to develop their activists efforts to fight for widespread credit card debt reform”.
You get that it wasn’t Variety who fumbled the ball there, right?
I was just making a silly, stupid Internet joke. I have no particular thoughts about variety or any other such internet publication.
Fair enough. Your joke just scrambled the premise a bit.
I thought your silly, stupid joke was just fine, but just for the record, Variety’s weekly print edition predates the Internet by several decades.
Bryce Dallas Howard is pretty.
The actual funniest bit of the whole thing is that the novel version that everyone thought was written by Taylor Swift isn’t the story of the movie at all, but rather the in-movie first novel written by Howard’s character which the post-credits scene implies will be adapted next (if tickets sell, one supposes) so the movie is a commercial for the book which will be the next movie. No one is doing it like Vaughn.
I enjoyed it, and I didn’t hate the twist, but holy cow that blonde wig on BDH just did not look good at all. That was something that took me out of the film for a bit, and was hard as hell to not seem weird. Considering she was a redhead in her spy life, why was there a need for a blonde wig?
BDH’s blonde wig looked much better than Dua Lipa’s DRY blonde wig.
Hard disagree. Maybe it’s because I spent the previous 90 minutes watching her as a redhead, but I genuinely thought they had brought in a different person to play Rachel Kylle before realizing “no, that’s just a bad wig”.
Agree to disagree. When this movie is streaming take a look at the rats nest on Dua Lipa’s wig. lol
Geena Davis’ character in The Long Kiss Goodnight was a redhead who went blonde once her pre-amnesia self reasserted, so BDH had to in this. That’s the rules of rip-offs. In fact, have we checked that Argylle wasn’t made by The Asylum?
That would be the greatest twist of all. It turns out Apple is actually The Asylum.
BDH looked so totally different in that dress and that wig that I thought for a second that she had been replaced by Mae Whitman for some reason. (Not that would be a bad thing.)
Pfft- the M:I Force had a cat agent back in the ‘60s.The Prisoner had a similar premise with a much bigger twist (again, back in the ‘60s).
And let’s not forget the classic Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth”
True- But Isis was some kind of shape-shifter. The M:I Force had an actual feline-type Earth cat.Did Argylle fans think their cat was sentient and/or a shape-shifter?
The movie’s logic and continuity were major issues for me.How could Elly be a best selling author and no one in the world remembers her as Rachel Kyle? Did I miss a line that she had no family/friends?You have a fight scene in oil which guns can’t be used because a spark could blow up the ship — but you can put knives on your boots and skate on metal? That would definitely create sparks. Also, Elly/Rachel slides on her knees in this oil, and when the scene is over, she just has one small black stain on her dress.Just a personal pet peeve: why must Sam Rockwell dance in movies? Is it in his contract?
By the terms of his standard contract he is required to “rock well” at lease once per film.
Nice.
If you don’t want to see Sam Rockwell get his groove on, then you and I go to the movies for very different reasons.
I know, right? That’s like wanting Christopher Walken not to dance. His name should really be Christopher Dancen.
I didn’t once even think the cat was a spy. Not during the marketing nor during the movie itself.
Nobody’s mentioned the stupid post-credits, either, that (if I understood it through all the muttering to myself) makes Agent Argylle’s origin story a rehash of Kingsman: The Secret Service, as if retold by someone who hadn’t paid much attention?
Better than the post-credits scene for The King’s Man, which treated the introduction of Adolf Hitler like Marvel teasing a new superhero.
He is the Thanos of mid century Europe
It’s so tasteless that in some weird way I almost have to admire it.Almost.
I never watched any of the Kingsman films (well, except for Argyle, assuming we’re counting it as a Kingsman film) so I had to look it up on Youtube.
As tasteless as introducing Hitler like Thanos was, I was even more disturbed by the scene implying Hitler and Lenin were both working for some guy in a monocle. They basically stated the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were both inventions of some secret mastermind.
That is exactly the same as the Black Hundreds calling the socialist movement a Jewish plot. The King’s Man just told a rehashed version of the Protocols of Zion, and no one in production seemed to notice?
Yeah, I’ve never watched the Kingsman films either and that’s not gonna change. I also just went to YouTube after I heard about the scene.I don’t think there’s ever a good reason to say, even in fiction, “The Third Reich was actually a (blank).” We know what the Third Reich was. We just need to remember that and make sure it or something like it doesn’t rise again.
So I got the twist completely wrong— I thought Elly was going to be a successful but lonely author who, in the absence of a boyfriend, writes her ideal man into the protagonist of her story, falls in love with her own character, and her reality-warper cat somehow wills him (and his entire world, with all the danger it entails) into existence with good intent, trying to help the owner they love while simultaneously making things a thousand times worse.I still think that’d be a good plot for its own film, but maybe it’s because I’ve spent a good chunk of my life writing roleplay/fanfiction and feel like a meta commentary on “falling in love with your OC and how that would realistically play out” would be interesting.
I’d read that book and/or see that movie.
I read that book and/or saw that movie.
“You don’t fuck a Toon!”
Ok, fair point, though I was thinking more of a deconstruction of fanfiction tropes that didn’t exist at the time.
Alan Wake II is somewhat like that— there’s a whole part where Alan doesn’t get along with a guy who shares the same name/appearance as the main character of his novels, who actually accuses him of stalking him because he knows too much about his life (it’s left ambiguous if it’s actually him or just a really weird coincidence).
Sounds the kind of enjoyable trippy version that Charlie Kaufman would write.
The movie is so very long. They needed to cut like 45 minutes out of it.
Another movie I’ll just skip and just watch the Pitch Meeting for it.
As I was reading this article and its argument that the movie would be better if the cat was the spy, I was thinking of the Pitch Meeting for ‘Mortal Kombat’ and the part where Producer Guy asks if the rules of the story would let a senior citizen who hit another champion with his car become a champion. When he’s told they could, he says, “Well let me ask you something: can we make that movie instead?”
Reminds me how Roger Ebert claimed Splash! would have been better if rather than have the mermaid fall in love with the sexy brother played by Tom Hanks, she could have fallen for the fat brother played by John Candy. Of course that might have been a bit of wish-fulfillment on Roger’s part.
The one joke I remember from is Splash is Tom Hanks’ character saying how John Candy’s character “brought a date to his own wedding.”
Making a mermaid fall in love with someone like that is just mean.
It might be barely an inconvenience, but even that would be too much for this movie.
I’m guessing the “twist” is required in order to make sure it’s not seen as a “Romancing the Stone” remake, which is what it would appear to be from the marketing.
‘”As for Argylle’s identity, if you predicted that Elly (Bryce Dallas Howard) would be a victim of some fancy brainwashing technique to make her forget her former life of espionage, not to mention her entire personality, you might also be a super spy. Because who could see that coming?”’
Or if you saw American Ultra, where Jessie Rosenberg did the something similar with his monkey comic strip doodles. At least until he’s awakened and revealed to be a sleeper cell agent by Connie Britton. He then proceeds to do the same stuff his monkey surrogate did. Also by the end we see more of his new adventures but only through his surrogate monkey doodles…
I saw the movie yesterday and I honestly thought it was a perfectly fine movie.
It wasn’t perfect by an stretch, but it was mostly entertaining (putting Sam Rockwell in your movie goes a long way in making it watchable). I actually liked the reveal because I think it was a deliberate choice to make the actual super spy not only a woman, but a woman who doesn’t fit into the typical “Bond Girl” stereotype. Now was the whole amenia/brainwashing thing good? Oh no, it was absolutely dumb, when you honestly think about them long enough, the plot of just about any spy movie is pretty dumb. Dumb doesn’t mean it’s not fun though.(With that said, the post-credits twist that this movie apparently takes place in some version of the Kingsmen universe is incredibly stupid and I hope nothing comes of it).
I guess we have to wait for ‘Argylle (Taylor’s Version)’ to fix the story.
I already wasn’t going to see this movie, and that was under the assumption that the twist was that the cat was supernaturally making it all come true. This is so much worse.
I guess I’m getting old because every time I saw the trailers (which was… often) I was confusing BDH with Jessica Chastain and I thought that was Owen Wilson on the train.So I guess yay for the movie clearing that up for me.
Bryce Dallas Howard… yikes. Is she ever good in anything? Such a baffling career until you check the “Early life” section of her wikipedia!
I have no interest in seeing this, as I generally don’t like Matthew Vaughn movies. This looks like Kingsman (which I didn’t like) but worse.But as the twist for this kind of light-hearted spy romp…..I dunno, it’s actually clever enough. It could have worked, in a movie not directed by Matthew Vaughn.
I’d rather just have a movie about actual psychic driving. Hell, you could even make it a fantasy version that actually works and doesn’t just make you irrevocably forget your life and everyone you ever loved.
I’ve read the plot of this film multiple times, still don’t get it!
Ian Fleming also was once a spy before he became the author who created James Bond. Just saying…
Is there also a scene in the movie where Bryce Dallas Howard realizes she’s only in the movie because Jessica Chastain said no.
The laziness and plot holes of Argylle’s script are actually offensive in their contempt for the audience. In what universe would a secret organization try to maintain its secrecy by having a series of bestselling “novels” published? If Elly/Rachel has been so thoroughly Manchurian Candidated that she can easily be forced to kill her lover, why couldn’t they get her to spill her secret? And if Elly herself is Argylle, why does she keep seeing Aidan morph into him, instead of his other identity Wyatt? For that matter, why does she end up dressed as the villain LaGrange instead of as her own identity Argylle?And even if you just view this as a dumb entertainment, Vaughn is way too much of a sniggering 10-yo to handle an actual regular-looking woman as the lead. Putting Howard in a similar outfit to Dua Lipa (let alone doing the crass “whirlybird,” TWICE) is actually cruel – if the same thing happened to me at a wedding I’d spend the entire time hiding in the bathroom. The Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy did a far better job with similar material, making the obvious jokes early on but then letting her be smart and sexy on her own terms. All this is bad enough, but then the movie had to go on for at least 40 minutes longer than necessary, all while subjecting us to some of the worst CGI I’ve seen. (Like, most of the time the cat is not shaped anything close to a real cat). After seeing the initial reviews when I’d already bought tickets, I braced myself by having a few drinks before watching this trainwreck but it wasn’t close to being enough. :-/
The worst thing about being over 50 years old is that plots keep getting recycled and nobody remembers. Instead, you end up sitting alone in a room saying, “THAT stupid idea again?”
Check out 1984’s “American Dreamer” with JoBeth Williams and Tom Conti, where a mystery writer visits Paris and hits her head. When she wakes up, she thinks she’s actually a spy. Or the same year, 1984’s “Romancing the Stone”, which had a similar plot.Hell, there are a lot of mystery writers who turned out to be spies in real life: John le Carré, Frederick Forsyth, W. Somerset Maugham, ad Graham Greene to name a few. It’s an old trope, but I love it.
My question was… what happened to her real parents. I don’t recall them mentioning them, are they dead? Missing? Replaced?I assumed the cat was always CGI because it was put in mortal danger, and they didn’t want audiences to think there was a chance it could be hurt. Of course, the ASPCA person on set would have made sure it wasn’t hurt. But I think it’s a fake CGI cat the whole time.
I mean, I feel like critics are taking this movie way too seriously, way more seriously than the filmmakers did. It’s a deeply, intentionally, stupid movie, from the twist, to the cat, to the insane action sequences. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun and at times very funny, with a great soundtrack. No one has ever accused Matthew Vaughn of being clever. However, I do agree that Dallas-Howard was very miscast, which pains me to say because I loved that they cast a normal sized woman as the action / romantic star and made no comment on it whatsoever. But she really seemed lost, and it seems did almost none of her own fighting or stunts which made all the action sequences with her suffer. Wish it had been Kaley Cuoco. It also could have been way shorter. But would I recommend it for a fun afternoon at the movies? Totally.