Director Matthew Vaughn Keeps Getting in His Own Way

In the mid-2000s, it seemed like director Matthew Vaughn would be an exciting young filmmaker. His gangster movie Layer Cake helped propel star Daniel Craig to landing the role of James Bond, and then Vaughn followed it up with the wry adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel, Stardust. While his next movie, Kick-Ass, was juvenile, it was at least pretty fun and felt like a lively take on superhero tropes. He then went and directed arguably the best X-Men movie¹ with the prequel film X-Men: First Class. He looked like he was flying high, and we could expect great things from him.

Instead, since 2014, he has churned out four spy movies. The first was Kingsman: The Secret Service, then the sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and then the prequel, The King’s Man. Now Vaughn has changed things up (except not really) with his new movie, Argylle. All four movies clearly work to evoke the spy movies of the 1960s but with modern touches like extreme violence and naughty language. The only way Argylle is significantly different is that it’s slightly toned down to a PG-13 (still lots of killing, but no CGI blood flying everywhere), and it works to drop the British angle even though the characters still go to London and the titular Argylle (Henry Cavill) is British.

More importantly, Argylle is emblematic of Vaughn’s repetitive set pieces, and how he will run headfirst into some really boneheaded ideas regardless how it services the overall movie.

[Spoilers ahead for all the Kingsman movies as well as Argylle] 

Kingsman: The Secret Service is the strongest of the bunch as it takes a fun premise of upending British classism to make a working-class youth Eggsy (Taron Egerton in a breakthrough performance) the James Bond-style hero. Most of the movie works, but you can see the signs that Vaughn never seems fully aware of how to handle the stakes of his own story. The bad guy’s big plan is to unleash a device via cell phone signal that sends anyone who hears it into a murderous rage. It’s part of a larger plan by the wealthy and powerful to reset humanity, which is a dumb plan since you’d have billions of corpses just littering the Earth and no one willing to do the job of repairing the world, but whatever. It’s a very Bond Villain-esque plan. 

But the stakes of mass slaughter are supposed to be bad, right? Except the way we see the plan in action for the first time is when one of our heroes, Harry (Colin Firth), goes to investigate a Westboro Baptist-style church, and the device is activated. Since Harry is a trained killer and the people in the church aren’t, this leads to a big action scene where Harry kills a bunch of people (who may have atrocious beliefs but weren’t trying to kill him of their own volition) set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” Vaughn absolutely loves setting violence to music, and so he loses the thread here of what the scene is supposed to mean. Either this villain’s weapon is horrific and it needs to be stopped, or it leads to some amazing action choreography, but it can’t be both. This kind of juvenile thinking rears its head again at the film’s climax when Eggsy encounters a beautiful princess who’s been captured and she tells him, “If you save the world, we can do it in the ass hole.” Secret Service has been straddling the line between hip-60s-style-spy-thriller and raucous-action-movie for its entire runtime, but you can see here that Vaughn wants the middle-school level joke more than he wants a tonally cohesive picture.

The problem of tonality continues to plague the Kingsman series, and it’s particularly bad in Argylle, which is perhaps Vaughn’s least imaginative movie yet. The big “twist” in Argylle is that author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who has written the successful Argylle books, is actually Agent Argylle (or, as the movie explains, Rachel Kylle, or R. Kylle—grooooooaaaaaannnnn). She was working for a shadowy spy organization known as The Division, and when she learned it was nefarious, she waffled on whether to get out or not. During her waffling, she was caught in an explosion that gave her amnesia. The Division then gave her new memories to make her think she was an author. When she authored the books, that would lead The Division to the “Master File” that could expose the organization.

I think somewhere in there is an interesting idea that Elly is the hero she’s been writing, but in execution, the film is a mess that constantly needs to slog through pages of exposition and narrative backflips to get to a fairly basic idea that this staid, lonely woman is actually a master assassin and spy. It’s a concept that was done far better in 1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight (it would be nice to think that Samuel L. Jackson’s brief presence in Argylle is a nod to that movie, but I suspect it’s more than Jackson is happy to accept an easy paycheck, and he previously worked with Vaughn on the first Kingsman movie). Also, once Elly learns that she was a secret agent, the film flounders for a new direction to where it basically feels like they’re just making it up as they go along.

Once again, you can see Vaughn falling into the same kind of dumb traps where he lacks awareness of what the picture needs. For example, the film leans heavily on “Now and Then,” a resurrected Beatles song that has its own history, and came out fully formed in November 2023. Vaughn’s desire to use a Beatles song that no one else had put in a movie clearly got the better of him, and so that becomes the song for Elly and her lover/fellow spy Aidan (Sam Rockwell) to the point where we’re told that they’ve been together for five years and that this is their song. So I guess Argylle takes place in the future, but that doesn’t really matter because it’s painfully distracting to hear “Now and Then” shoved into scenes where it will never have a life of its own because it already carries too much history. Perhaps Vaughn could argue that “Now and Then” is a good song because it represents the Elly/Rachel divide, but plenty of songs can do that. He clearly wanted an unused Beatles song without considering that just because a song hasn’t been in a movie, that doesn’t mean it’s free from any connotations.

Vaughn also seems unaware of how to pace his film as he puts two action scenes back-to-back. The first one, where Aidan and Elly shoot a bunch of bad guys in a fog of colored smoke grenades is pretty fun! However, during their escape, they get into a room that starts leaking crude oil because the bad guys’ base is on an oil tanker. Since Elly knows how to ice skate, she jams two blades into her boots, and proceeds to slice up all the bad guys. She can’t shoot them because if she does, the oil will ignite…except at the climax of the scene where she gets a gun and shoots all the remaining bad guys anyway. A savvier director would have realized at the scripting stage that the scene may have a neat concept (ice skating/fighting) but the movie is already running long, and nothing here is going to advance the plot or characters. Best to cut it and maybe see if it will work better in a future movie. But not Vaughn! Nope, you’re going to sit through some of the worst CGI you’ve ever seen to see a woman skate through oil while never getting any on her dress.

Watching a Matthew Vaughn movie now just bums me out. I can’t say he’s bereft of talent, because he does know how to put together some of the pieces, and at times has come out with some above-average movies. But for the last decade, he’s been playing in his own sandbox (spoiler: a nonsensical post-credits scene tries to tie Argylle to the Kingsman-verse because of course it does) and showing that he’s hit his ceiling. He’s too married to immature notions of what will be “cool” that he’s willing to sacrifice tone, pacing, character, and story at the altar of a joke or a set piece that doesn’t serve the larger picture. I would say that Vaughn needs to grow up, but it appears any kind of maturity is already behind him.

Over on Decoding Everything

For more thoughts on Argylle, be sure to check out William Bibbiani’s review.

¹ I have trouble considering Logan an X-Men movie since it’s not really about the team of mutants, but about Wolverine. For me, Logan is the best thing out of the X-Men universe, but First Class is the best of anything with the X-Men team.