'Argylle' Represents Everything Wrong With Comedies Right Now
#260: "Argylle," "Mr. And Mrs. Smith," "Players," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "X"
Edition 260:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
This week: How much should I freak out about the meta spy comedy that represents everything I dislike about the genre?? Deep breaths. We’ve got an awesome new show on Amazon, a fun Netflix movie, and some great streaming recs to pass along. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Glenn Powell has officially entered his movie star era.
Argylle
It’s probably good that I had a week to cool down before writing this review for Argylle, because last week’s version would’ve another sermon from my soapbox asking the same question I’ve asked many times before: “is this what we want our movies to be?!?!”
See my reviews of M3GAN, Bullet Train, Bad Boys For Life, Persuasion, See How They Run (to name a few, of many), and you’ll see this common refrain. Cool is out and ironic detachment is in. This overly “meta” winking style of comedy took over the genre like a plague, slowly killing it from the inside. Now movies spend their first halves making fun of themselves, insisting they’re in on the joke of how ridiculous this all is alongside the audience, and then they make the turn into their second half and beg the very same viewers to take the stakes of the movie seriously. Unfortunately, you can only tell us a movie is bad so many times before we believe you.
Or maybe bad is the point? During a ludicrously staged opening sequence, Argylle explodes onto the screen with cartoonish characters, bad one-liners and terrible CGI. Henry Cavil drives a jeep down the rooftops of a green scree…err I mean Greek village chasing … Dua Lipa on a motorcycle, until she gets yanked off by … John Cena. There’s like three things in there I can’t believe are real.
BUT WAIT! It’s all within the made up world of a trashy spy novel, so it’s okay! Laugh at it! Pull back into the far more dull world of the author, played by Bryce Dallas Howard (seems like a lovely person but name a movie where her performance has impressed you…I’ll wait). She dances by herself to, quite appropriately, “Now And Then” by the Beatles, a song created using AI and released in 2024 (in collaboration with Apple, which is distributing this movie). Artifice on artifice.
And…hang on a second…now the espionage world has come to her real world! Sam Rockwell is a real life spy? And all the ludicrous crap is happening in real life?? When the big twist comes and everyone in my theater was either silent or laughing at how dumb it was, there’s plausible deniability that this was the intention. The climactic battle, which I don’t mind spoiling, involves Howard putting on a pair of ice skates mid-fight to skate around on a layer of spilled oil sludge and stab bad guys with a bayonet. That has to be a joke, right?
As I’ve said before, I hate everything about that approach to moviemaking.
With the benefit of an extra week to get perspective, and see how this movie is bombing at the box office, it’s become a much simpler equation. Argylle is just a good ol’ fashioned garden variety bad movie. Director Matthew Vaughn, an early Guy Ritchie collaborator who has made movies in the past that I like (Kick-Ass, Kingsman) tried to do some things, tried to be fun, and just failed. That happens. It’s not that big of a deal.
I can hope, pray even, that the failure of this movie signals some kind of turn back to earnest storytelling, back to movies not being afraid to show effort, to try to be cool. I could point to Top Gun: Maverick or Oppenheimer or even the recent success of Anyone But You as examples of audiences embracing old fashioned aspirational sensibilities. But I know it’ll likely be as long of a transition out of this trend as it was into it.
In the meantime, it’s quite easy just to skip this movie and move right along.
Something New
Mr. And Mrs. Smith (Amazon Prime): Everyone was right to be skeptical of a TV show remaking a movie, especially one that’s less than 20 years old and still casts a Brangelina-sized shadow. But this new show subverts the original in several clever ways — rather than being about a husband and wife who don’t know each other are spies, in this case our spies are matched up as a work assignment and need to figure the marriage part out. For all it’s adventure-of-the-week action in each episode, and don’t get me wrong they are using mammoth Amazon budgets to do some incredible set pieces, the spine of this season is the love story between our titular spies, played by Donald Glover and Maya Erskine.
Glover, also one of the show-runners, is the level of creative who can basically be trusted blindly at this point. He and “Atlanta” collaborator Francesca Sloane find cleverness in the micro elements of the show like dialogue and surprising twists, and also outlay the arc of a story that’s compelling as a whole. Somehow, Glover is also a megawatt star as a performer, and Erskine is a perfectly calibrated match for him, bringing humanity and humor to the role in a way that makes it feel grounded, which isn’t easy to do given the circumstances.
I also just have to give a shoutout to Hiro Murai, who directs the first two episodes, including the pilot episode that is the high point of the season. Murai is basically responsible for directing some of my favorite episodes of “Barry” (my all-time fav show), “Station Eleven” (maybe my favorite of 2021), and “Atlanta.” It’s often said that TV is a writer’s medium, and that’s true, but all it takes is watching how incredible the first episode of this show looks and feels and flows to see what a difference a top director can make. Can’t recommend this show more highly.
Players (Netflix): This is the exact type of movie Netflix makes a dozen times every year — cheap, fun, forgettable. I won’t pretend like this is a cut above the others, but in comparison to the Netflix originals in years past, Players doesn’t have that same half-baked quality. It’s a fully formed concept, centered on an early-30s woman (Gina Rodriguez) living in Brooklyn who, along with her three male friends, runs elaborate “plays” to pick up romantic partners out at the bars. Under a real life microscope, the behavior is incredibly “toxic” (as the kids say), but it’s the exact kind of movie premise that gives a plot its energy. (**she also works as a local sports journalist, which led to several moments of hilarious unintentional comedy for me personally**)
Once you get past the fact that the cast is way too old (Rodriguez is 39 and Damon Wayans Jr. looks every bit of 41), it’s quite easy to fall for their natural chemistry and snappy dialogue (one of Wayans’ one-liner deliveries has immediately entered my movie quote lexicon). When the movie has to get serious it loses momentum, as is the case with many rom-coms, but the frame is surprisingly sturdy enough to hold the dramatic tension, and the payoff is satisfying. For the sake of comparison, I would say this cheesy rom-com is every big as competent (though not nearly as lavish visually) as Anyone But You.
Something Old
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956, The Criterion Channel): Alfred Hitchcock liked this story so much that he remade his own movie from 1934, this time with modern technology (including color photography!) and his muse Jimmy Stewart at the helm, starring as an innocent doctor who gets tangled up in an international conspiracy after chatting up the wrong person on a bus in Morocco.
As with a lot of Hitchcock movies, it’s plot-first with exciting things happening one after the next, the action is driven by a fish-out-of-water everyman and set against a tourism guide of famous locations, beginning in Marrakesh and ending in an epic climax at Great Albert Hall in London.
While the top tier of Hitchcock movies is pretty unassailable — North by Northwest, Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window — this might actually be my favorite of the second tier. It’s funny and exciting in equal measure, with memorable characters and awesome locations. If you’re looking to expand your overall film repertoire, this is a great one to seek out.
Something to Stream
X (Netflix): Hollywood spends so much time recycling old IP (see “Trailer Watch” below for one example) and so little time creating new IP, especially at the lower budget levels. That’s why I tip my cap to director Ti West, who turned a run-of-the-mill A24 horror movie into a trilogy of movies starring the superstar-in-the-making Mia Goth.
The first of these movies from 2022 just dropped on Netflix, a one-location affair set in 1979 about a group of promiscuous young people in Texas who rent out a guesthouse on a farm in order to film a porn movie at the dawn of the VHS era. The super old couple who live in the main house on the property turn out to be creeps, or worse, and as you might expect people start getting killed in gruesome and creative ways. It goes without saying that you should avoid if you’re bothered either by sexual content or violence, because this is a pulpy visceral thrill ride.
Jenna Ortega may be on the poster, and Brittany Snow may have the most lines, but Mia Goth is the main draw here, playing a young ambitious woman who will do anything to be a star — and, caked in makeup and prosthetics, she also plays the old woman from the house, whose character wanted to be a star really bad and never made it (the second movie is a prequel about that old woman’s earlier life, played by Goth again). It’s one of those undeniable breakthrough performances where someone goes from an unknown to one of the most exciting young stars overnight.
Trailer Watch: Twisters
Glenn Powell is officially a movie star. After the success of Top Gun: Maverick flying co-pilot to Tom Cruise, then surprising everyone with the success of Anyone But You ($171 worldwide!!), we’re starting to see the emergence of a guy who can front a big budget blockbuster….with the little help of some pre-existing IP (the 1996 original was a big hit).
I can’t quite fathom how this movie is being directed by the same person as Minari (Lee Isaac Chung), but that makes me all the more hopeful for some good storytelling on top of the CGI spectacle. If nothing else, Glenn Powell in cowboy hat!