CGI Cats, Explosions, and ‘Argylle’ (review)
After seeing the trailer no less than five hundred times between September and now, I finally gave in and watched it.
When I became violently ill from food poisoning the day I was supposed to see the movie, I should’ve taken it as a sign that Argylle was not going to be worth my time. Instead, I rebooked my ticket (thanks, AMC Stubs!) and settled into my seat with my pretzels (not the best idea with my still recovering stomach) as the movie began.
Argylle follows Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) as her life as a writer of spy novels is quickly turned around when she meets real-life spy Aidan, played by Sam Rockwell (in such a convincing disguise I didn’t even recognize him until he takes it off!). He needs her help defeating some type of bad guy organization, as the events she writes about in her books seem to be taking place in the real world. This premise is made more interesting when considering the marketing for this movie, including an ARG-adjacent set of clues involving an Instagram account and book, seemingly created by Howard’s character, Elly Conway. Along with the fact that the star-studded cast includes Dua Lipa, John Cena, Henry Cavill, and Chip the Cat, there were even rumors that the entire movie was a secret ploy masterminded by none other than Taylor Swift.
Going into the movie, I was decently excited and almost morbidly curious, after reading a particularly scathing review by the New York Times. For about the first hour or so, I wasn’t feeling too bad about the movie. It was serviceable! Sure, the scenes taking place in the novel were almost nauseatingly filmed, but I chalked it up to a purposeful cheesiness. I also noticed the movie was incredibly loud, but I was sitting in the back of the theater. A lot more small critiques like these started to pile up as the movie went on, however, and they stopped being so small. There’s a weird focus on the “final” Beatles song, “Now and Then”, the CGI seems rushed, and director Matthew Vaughn seems to not know when to end a scene. But once the big reveal of how exactly Elly Conway is able to write so prophetically comes, the movie seems to take a turn. It was an interesting reveal, but it unfortunately seems to come at the midway point of the movie. This means that for what felt like the next two hours, I was struggling with… caring or being interested in what was happening on the screen.
And the cat. Besides the animal welfare concerns regarding the breed, it looks weird. And not in a “cats look weird way”. Despite the fact that they seemingly used a real cat for the movie, Alfie (Chip the Cat) has the same deepfake-y look and movements that seem too perfect to be true. Think Disney de-aging. It just looks… creepy. Maybe it’s good that I was too distracted by the cat, however. It’s telling that I found the movie to be most boring in the parts where he wasn’t on screen.
Could a real cat save this movie? Probably not. At least it wasn’t Cats (2019) level CGI cat, though.
Rating: 2.5/5
