Argylle review – unbearably self-satisfied smirk of a spy caper from Matthew Vaughn

What could have been a fun movie is instead self-admiring with a dull meta-narrative, phoned-in cameos and an awful lead performance

The rectangle of the screen itself seems to bend and twist into a giant self-satisfied smirk for this unbearably smug caper from director Matthew Vaughn. It has all the interest of a men’s magazine cover-shoot: thin, flimsy, lumbered with a dull meta-narrative and dodgy acting, and boasting a blank parade of phoned-in cameos from the supporting cast. Argylle is a high-concept elevator pitch stuck between floors, a piece of colourful would-be franchise content that Vaughn is tiresomely trying to fold into the extended universe of his other work.

I have in the past enjoyed this director’s raucous bad taste, and it’s not true to say that he can only direct macho guys because he got such great stuff from Chloë Grace Moretz in his superhero comedy Kick-Ass. But through some terrible directing anti-alchemy, he has elicited an awful lead performance here from Bryce Dallas Howard as spy novelist Elly Conway, whose creations uncannily mirror real life. She looks waxy, inert and uncomfortable; it’s as if she is wearing cut-glass contact lenses, with a torpid, unfocused quality which the script’s big twist does not explain or excuse. Vaughn and screenwriter Jason Fuchs never give this writer any funny or interesting lines or find a satisfying way to let her character in on the unwieldy joke and bring out her supposed dual quality as action heroine – although it was, admittedly, ingenious of Vaughn and Fuchs to bring out a novelisation of the film this month supposedly written by “Elly Conway” herself.