THE BLOODLESS ULTRAVIOLENCE OF "ARGYLLE"
reviewing a film everybody heard of but nobody saw
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I love bad movies. It’s not exactly a unique trait. Many of us were raised on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and graduated from that to things like
’s How Did This Get Made? or Red Letter Media’s Best of the Worst. Bad movies can be uniquely inspiring, or just really fuckin’ funny.And then there’s the other kind, the kind that keep me up at night with a fevered compulsion, much like Megalopolis did. When the petri dish should have been tossed in the incinerator, but someone loved it enough to keep sneaking into the lab at night and feeding it money, instead.
And isn’t the point of art to disturb the comfortable, comfort the disturbed? Consider me disturbed. And the following three thousand words about a movie I absolutely did not like?
Consider that comfort.
So, Argylle. A spy movie where the central premise is that the main character is an author who writes spy novels so realistic, they attract the attention of an Evil Spy Ring. (More on that later.) It had a lot of controversy when it came out, regarding a sort of botched marketing campaign that attempted to defictionalize its female lead, the author Elly Conway. When the defictionalization went poorly (because Google) the marketing team coyly allowed a rumor to float to the top of the internet - that the book/movie project involved Taylor Swift as its ghost writer. This was permitted to promulgate unchecked until Reasonable Adult Bryce Dallas Howard said, and I quote, “We can’t pretend she was involved” on an episode of the Graham Norton Show.1
Despite the memetic dust-up created by the film’s messy marketing, it came and went with little fanfare. It mathematically bombed, and no one talked about it. In fact, when my friend Ryan suggested watching it, my reaction was something like “The fake Taylor Swift movie?” Director Matthew Vaughn was quoted as “genuinely scratching (his) head” with regard to what he called “harsh” reviews. "It’s a fun, feel-good movie,” said Vaughn.
“…or I thought it was a fun, feel-good movie.”
I bet he genuinely did.
