Argylle (2024) Maybe....just maybe director Matthew Vaughn should have requested a sit down with Steven Spielberg about the making of Spielberg's legendary disaster '1941'.
From Spielberg, he could learn the perils of attempting to make the loudest, craziest, most ridiculous over-the-top, special effects laden film ever made.......that is until some other director, fueled with enough hubris and ego to power a moon shot, tries to top him.
Or being based in the U.K. Vaughn should have tracked down anyone left alive involved in the making of the 1967, multi-director fiasco "Casino Royale".....
Imagine the agony he'd spare us in this futile effort to post a rational review of "Argylle".
Then again, maybe this comic-book Bond spoof on steroids, in which Vaughn finally meets his junk movie Armageddon, was inevitable.
Vaughn, who favors wildly exaggerated heroes thrown into equally fantastical situations ("Kick Ass", the "Kingsman" series) no doubt planned for "Argylle" to far exceed all the excesses of his previous films.
In that regard, he more than succeeds. "Argylle" a mish-mash blend of "Romancing The Stone" and every Bond, Bourne, Die Hard and Lethal Weapon you've ever seen, maintains a lunatic frenzy from start to finish.
But it's also a movie that not only flaunts and takes pride in its own idiocy, it seems to demand our respect for the amount of energy (and budget dollars) that went into making it. As if to say to us, "Never mind how dumb it is, look at the sheer size and scope of the crap we put on the screen for you...."
We'll not deny that there's a few chunks of it we enjoyed and laughed at in the best guilty-pleasure tradition. Isolated chunks. And somewhere, deeply buried within the mind-numbing bog of its 139 minutes, we suspect there's a super-fast, funny movie struggling to get out........probably at 85 minutes.
But that's clearly not the movie Vaughn wanted to make. His agenda was to pound you senseless with a senseless spectacle,,,,,,where the sheer mindless lunacy of it would render viewers helpless to resist
What he failed to realize......along with Spielberg while making "1941" and the 1967 "Casino Royale" creative team......they'd drained all the fun out of their movies.......leaving what was left loud, moronic, worthless......and entertaining to no one.
1 star (*).
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