Argylle is a fizzle… and this from a guy who liked The King’s Man (that third Kingsman movie everyone hates). In fact, I like most of his films so when I come down hard on Argylle, I’m not doing it with joy.

The film is about a writer of spy fiction (Bryce Dallas Howard) who gets mixed up in a real game of international espionage. A secret spy agency thinks her books are too accurate and now they are after her for the secrets at the end of her latest. There are some twists and turns the trailer doesn’t reveal so I can’t say a lot more…

This film is a tonal disaster zone… which is slightly put back together once its big secret is revealed. But for the first act or two, I was actively annoyed at the film for being all over the place conceptually. Nothing was making sense and, even once it becomes clear, some of it still doesn’t. It’d probably work on second watch… which isn’t likely to happen.

One huge problem is the very very lame comedy. This flick just doesn’t work no matter how hard they try to joke about spies and cats and cats and spies. The cat… the fake CGI cat… is almost a crutch the way they cut back to it… and, like everything else, it’s just not funny.

In fact, the CGI cat is a pretty bad visual effect in a sea of bad effects. I’m not usually one to harp on bad visuals but this film is full of ’em. Almost every digital stunt person is immediately detectable including when they didn’t really need to comp a fake person (or cat) in. It’s pretty terrible… cat and all.

The other big problem is that Bryce Dallas Howard gets to put on a cool front in the second half of the film… and she’s just not a cool enough actor to pull it off (or maybe the script or editing betray her). Charlize Theron? You got it. Bryce Dallas Howard? Try hard. And she’s working with Sam Rockwell who is a lot of things, but can’t pull of whatever cool motif they got him trying either.

Which makes the final act a wannabe mess as Matthew Vaughn tries to pull out all the stops he got away with in his better movies. My jaw was on the floor with how flubbed these cool, slow-mo, colorful action scenes were trying to be. The whole final act – all ten hours of it – was a disaster. A try-hard, obvious “look how cool I am!” disaster.

Did I mention the movie is a solid 40 minutes too long and keeps going long after its action sell-by date?

This is a huge misfire only saved a little by a pretty creative turn-about in the plot. The Matthew Vaughn signature action just doesn’t work and they’ve plugged the wrong stars into it. I guess everyone’s got their dog days.

Score: 64