Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle is the kind of film that would cause a much bigger uproar if it weren’t released in the first quarter of the year, when studios tend to dump the projects they have the least faith in. It’s the kind of easily digestible popcorn film to see when you’ve already seen the remnants of the previous year and have caught up with the crop of Oscar nominees still hanging around. It shamelessly pays homage to the spy thrillers of yesteryear, along with films like Romancing the Stone or the recent The Lost City, without really carving out its own space in the genre.

Vaughn has shown himself to be an adept action filmmaker, especially in the Kingsman franchise, utilizing frenetic camera movements and over-the-top violence to make something distinct, whether it’s relying on original material or not. Argylle contains the same trademarks but is noticeably toned down to obtain a PG-13 rating.

The film follows Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a hapless spy novelist whose massively popular “Agent Argylle” series mysteriously mirrors real-world events. She’s recently finished the fifth book in the series when, on a routine visit to her mother (Catherine O’Hara), she’s roped into a situation with real-life spy Aidan (Sam Rockwell). They’re soon on the run from a shadowy organization of bad guys run by Ritter (Bryan Cranston), along with Elly’s emotional support cat, Alfie, who tags along in a bubbled backpack. The film cuts to Alfie so often you’d think he was second billed.

Vaughn employs a neat visual trick in these early action scenes, where we’ll get Elly’s POV and, as she blinks, she flashes between seeing Aidan and her vision of Agent Argylle (Henry Caville), who we see in the film’s opening scene as a visualization of the most recent book. These motifs, along with the imagined version of Argylle and his partner Wyatt (John Cena) mostly go away in the film’s second half, but Lee Smith’s editing is an unexpected highlight as it cuts between the dream scenario and the real world.

If all of this sounds convoluted to you, it gets worse. And I’ll leave out the bulk of the plot machinations for the sake of spoilers, but suffice it to say the back half of Argylle contains twist after twist after twist, and barely any of them pass the smell test. But it’s hard to get too mad at the film; I think Vaughan knows how silly it all is, so he finds ways to pepper in flourishes and sequences that would never hold up to any kind of scrutiny in what we know as reality. Consider the scene late in the film where a character somehow straps a pair of knives to their boots and skates on an oil slick like an Olympic figure skater while going on a murder spree.

Thankfully Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell are effortlessly charming together, and Howard especially holds her own as an action star. What ultimately holds Argylle back, aside from the unnecessarily long runtime (139 minutes) and the equally unnecessarily complicated plot is that it feels like a diet version of Vaughn’s bread and butter.

Action scenes are electrically choreographed, but they’re mostly bloodless and are hampered by bad visual effects. Aside from the aforementioned scene and the visual flourishes, the film lacks the inventiveness that Vaughn has brought to his previous work. You sometimes get the impression that Argylle is a kind of stepping stone for Vaughn so he can get the green light to make more Kingsman movies. (Eagle-eyed viewers will likely catch at least one Easter Egg to that franchise throughout this film. ) The internet has had a lot of fun with the film’s marketing of discovering who the “real Agent Argylle” is, but once you actually find out, you’re simply left with a mostly generic action film that tries too hard to be clever.

Argylle will release in theaters everywhere on February 2.

OSCAR POTENTIAL:

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