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‘Argylle’ Review: It’s Tough Keeping Track of Which Way’s Up in Matthew Vaughn’s Catawampus Spy Comedy
'Kingsman' helmer Matthew Vaughn enlists an American cast (and one cute kitty) in a convoluted plot with a fiction writer at the center of the action.
If the broad strokes of Jason Fuchs’ script seem to have been borrowed outright from such pulp-flavored adventure movies as “The Lost City” and “Romancing the Stone,” or else spy-memoir satires “Hopscotch” and “Burn After Reading,” that doesn’t negate the fact that they provide a reasonably fun way for Vaughn to place a female protagonist in the middle of a typically testosterone-heavy genre. At 160 seconds, the film’s ridiculous trailer gives a reasonable idea of what to expect, but that off-putting amuse bouche leaves out how the human brain starts to adjust to such an unabashedly kitschy approach when immersed in it for nearly as many minutes (in what’s becoming an exhausting norm among Apple co-productions, “Argylle” runs well over two hours). While common sense and good taste may be inclined to resist Vaughn’s garishly over-the-top style at first, the movie eventually finds its groove — right around the scene where Howard and Rockwell erupt from a bunker beneath a Barbie-pink smokescreen, leaving a trail of heart-shaped sparks in their wake.
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