Argylle

I was so excited to see this when I first saw the trailer.  I thought that this was going to be yet another smash hit by AppleTV, who had recently made films such as Killers of the flower Moon, CODA, and Greyhound. The cast was incredible as well: Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose, John Cena, and Samuel L. Jackson just to name a few. The trailer really made it seem like this was going to be an awesome movie, so I was pretty sad when I was unable to go see the film with my friends because of some last-minute thing. That is, until I heard the reviews by my friends telling me that it was a rather large let-down. Now, I trust my friends, so I decided not to see the movie in theaters and wait until it hit streaming. It hit AppleTV+ not long ago and I finally got around to watching it and I can confidentially say that my friends were correct. This movie is a rather large let down.

Argylle starts off pretty good. We meet the protagonist, a successful spy novelist who somehow gets mixed up in real espionage and we are greeted by high level of really cool choreographed fight scenes mixed with sexy characters. Sadly, as the film moves along, it steadily goes downhill. At one point, the movie goes from cool spy movie, to just downright silly. Argylle's biggest sin which take it from being a good movie to a barely passable movie is the poor and lazy writing towards the end of the film. Screenwriter Jacon Fuchs had come up with a really cool concept for a film but could not bring it home. It seemed to me that they ran out of content about halfway through for just filled the empty pages with nonsensical plot twists that made me as the viewer say, "what are they doing?" Argylle had all the makings of a great spy film but fell short.