That is to say, unfortunately Matthew Vaughn has officially become a director of diminishing returns. Out of the gate, Vaughn only continued to improve with each of his first five features. In his first (seemingly) original film since 2014 after making three films in the same universe and launching a third franchise with Argylle clearly intended to be a fourth (even though that definitely won't happen), it would seem Vaughn has finally hit a career low. While this would seem to indicate he can only go up from here, this winking hodgepodge of a meta-comedy, action caper lets us know early on what we're in for when it becomes clear just how little Vaughn is invested in the construction of the film by the placement of the title card. Why would you not at least save it until after the worst looking high speed car chase in history?
Written by Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman) and including such classic dialogue as, “You and I, we’re not so different…” it is important to stay aware of the film's intent as Argylle unravels (pun fully intended). The point being, there is no intention or ideas outside of being "big" entertainment. Not even pure entertainment because if that were the case this would have been half an hour shorter, but in keeping with the "big" part of being entertaining this is nearly two and a half hours and absolutely doesn't need to be. Had they streamlined some of this overly convoluted nonsense it might have actually resonated simply as entertaining and fun, but it instead becomes a laughable (as in definitely laughing at and now with) slog. Even worse, a lot of the admittedly inventive action set pieces would be really clever and genuinely funny if they didn’t look like complete shit. I just can't understand how Vaughn's modern action sequences are so much uglier than the outright classics he was concocting ten and fifteen years ago?
