 Everyone's talking about Argyle. Well, actually, no one's talking about Argyle. It bombed at the box office, which is no surprise. It cost $200 million to make for a quirky spy comedy that's not established. It's a bold strategy, Cotton, and it hasn't paid off. But I'm going to talk about this film nevertheless in spoiler fashion, so let's dive in. Now, I do have a review on the channel already. It's spoiler-free. So if you want to hear about the film without going into detail, check that video out. Maybe subscribe even since you're here. And then you can go to that one later. Hit the notification bell so these show up in your feed. Otherwise, I'm just going to get lost in the shuffle on YouTube. It's a disgusting thing going on. Like the video, share it, do all that stuff. Okay, I'm going into spoilers right out of the gates, shot out of a cannon. We start this film on a very high note, I think. It's a Matthew Vaughn film, by the way. He's done Kingsman. He's done Kick-Ass. He's done X-Men First Class. And Kingsman's really the thing he does. That's what he's known for. He's done a couple of those movies. So this is a fresh start, but really, it's kind of the same thing again as all of his films. A lot of high energy action, some really weird comedy choices, some crazy fake CG. But again, we're starting out at the beginning We see Argyle, the lead character, played by Henry Cavill, Superman. He's dancing with Dua Lipa, the smoke show Dua Lipa. She's playing a character, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. She's a bad guy. And she gets the jump on Henry Cavill's character, Argyle. The smoke comes down. They start shooting at him, but he gets away because he's got a buddy behind the wheel. He's got a hacker on his side. Essentially, Henry Cavill is James Bond. And he's also a character in a book. After a little bit of a, maybe a 10 minute opener, which is basically the majority of Henry Cavill's entire existence in this two and a half hour film almost, we then cut away and find out that the whole thing's being written by Ellie Conway. I think that's her name. I have no, Ellie Conway. Yeah, I have IMDb in front of me because I'm terrible with names. She's the author of the hit Argyle book series. There's four or five books. This is to be the last one, but she's having good old fashioned writers block. By the way, Ellie Conway is played by Bryce Dallas Howard. You may know her as Ron Howard's daughter or better know her as the Claire character from Jurassic World. Remember that great character Claire, who is a total data driven bitch in the first movie, but then she's suddenly a peace keeping I love dinosaur friendly character in the second one. Not a great, not a great character, but she's been a lot of other stuff. Black Mirror is probably the thing I know her the most from and appreciate her acting the most from or Spider-Man 3 where she's blonde and looks really weird but in a great way. Here, she's a writer. She's very down on herself. She's kind of scared to go out into the real world, go on any sort of adventure. So she lives in her books because she was brainwashed too. That's the big twist we'll get to later. Her mom in this Catherine O'Hare, home alone mom. She's fantastic. Schitt's Creek. If you watch it, shout out to Schitt's Creek fans. It's a great show, great comedy. She has a small role here, but she's always fun to see. I love her. She's gonna meet her daughter and they're gonna pound out the ending of this book together. They're gonna get it right because the ending that she's put forth is incredibly mediocre. It ends on a cliffhanger that's never gonna get resolved. And the reason is it's basically the end of the road for Ellie's character memories. Ellie has been brainwashed by Brian Cranston who's playing her dad. We'll find out later. That's a big reveal. He works for a super secret agency called The Syndicate or Something. I don't remember the name. It really doesn't matter. They're the bad guys in this James Bond-esque novel. The James Bond stuff, the novel, everything that Ellie writes down is happening. And so they think that she has some sort of foresight or she's creating the future with the writing, but in actuality, she's already lived out all of this stuff before because she is the real Argyle. What? That's right. Ellie's Argyle. It's so simple. It's so perfect. Except for it's kind of not. Here's where someone will inevitably get upset with me because that's just the way of it, but I don't really care that much anymore about any of that stuff. Bryce Dells Howard is a sturdy girl. She's gained some weight. She's thick and she looks great. I'm not knocking the weight at all. She looks fantastic. The only thing I will say that comes off as a negative about it is she's supposed to be playing a very, very good secret agent. She is Argyle. She's supposed to be able to do flips and spins and twirls and all sorts of amazing acrobatic feats. In the second half of the movie, she pulls that stuff off except for obviously not really. It's all fake. Fake as hell as a matter of fact. There is a disconnect at that point. The first half her character is fantastic and it makes sense and it lines up with her. But in the second half, when she's able to just effortlessly dispatch all these guys and skate around on oil and do all this amazing stuff, I am a little bit put out by the film. Kind of like, I see what you were trying to do, but Bryce House Howard, how she appears in the movie is not selling me. And so if I upset any of you with that obvious observation, I apologize, but we're going to move past it. And might I add, again, she looks fantastic. She just doesn't have double agent body. The same way I don't have giant weight lifting bro body, I'm not going to be oiled up, going up in front of people and flexing. I'll get laughed off the stage and that's fine. We all have different body types. We all have different things that we're good at and that we can appear to be good at. All right, moving past this, Sam Rockwell's in the film and what's going to happen is she's going to get on a train to go meet her mother and so that they can figure out this thing together. Her mom was going to go meet her but she's going to flip the script and go see her. Sam Rockwell's on the train. He looks like a hobo. I actually thought it was Will Forte, no joke, no cap. As they say, Sheila, they still saying no cap online? No? Okay, great. I'm in touch. He's on the train and he's complimenting the cats and he clearly knows who she is because he himself is an agent. He's working for this super secret slick organization run by Samuel L. Jackson and maybe just Samuel L. Jackson. It doesn't seem like there's many people privy to this information that he has but he's there to protect Ellie Conway and just so happens that there's a lot of bad guys on this train ready to take her out at that very same moment. So he's beating the shit out of dudes. He's flipping people around and this is where I'm having a good time but I'm also a little bit annoyed because they do this blink effect throughout the film and every time she blinks and pops back to he gets replaced by Henry Cavill by her Argyle character from the book but in actuality she's just kind of seeing herself I guess through what Sam Rockwell's doing. What's his character name? Aidan Wilde. Sam Rockwell's having a great time by the way and his chemistry, the rapport with him and Bryce Dallas Howard. It's on point. They're very good together. They work great together and again Bryce Dallas Howard. The camera loves her eyes. Those eyes just shine bright like a diamond, Rihanna and it looks great. There's a terrific fight for a while on this train that's flipping between awesome to bizarre when we do the Henry Cavill stuff. This whole movie is like that. It's such an inconsistent goulash for me. That's why I referenced in my review this is really one half Kingsman another half Kingsman 2. I love Kingsman. Still my favorite movie by Matthew Vaughn. Kingsman 2, I don't mind. I don't hate it but it's a disaster of a film. It's a shit show and I haven't rewatched it. When you put these two powers together you get Argyle, a movie that's all over the place. After a somewhat riveting fight sequence that's not even close to rivaling that of the church scene from the Kingsman from 20 years ago or however long it's been they blow out the backside on a parachute this fake CG cats along for the ride. Another character that seems to only exist to sell merchandise maybe for someone but I don't know who wants this cat. It's PG-13. It doesn't really have the demo. So we just have this cat who looks fake as shit inside of this backpack for 90% of the movie doing virtually nothing except for occasionally meowing which screws our main protagonist over. That's gonna lead to hijinks and action and then we move on to the next set piece. These two take a beat for a second. Sam Rockwell cleans up. They have a little bit of a conversation in apartment building and then it's off to the races as Ellie is gonna try to figure out what the next step is. She has to figure out the book before she writes it and so they go to a location which then is intercepted by the bad guys with Brian Cranston at the lead. Keep in mind Brian Cranston. I love him. He's a great actor. He's not really given that much to work with here. The dialogue's pretty piss poor and he always elevates the material and just being there is definitely great but it could have been so much better. He should have been a fantastic villain instead of just an alright villain. All right, they get dispatched by bad guys. They go to this building. They hide under the floorboards which you see in the trailer. Sam Rockwell jumps up. He does a little slow motion spin. Shoots a bunch of guys. This does lead to a funny moment that comes back later where Sam Rockwell takes out a bunch of guys and he gives Bryce Dallas Howard the task of making sure they're dead by curb stomping them. He wants her to slam down in their heads and then twist her boot. She's unable to do this. That's a hard pill to swallow. I'm not sure I could do it in the moment like just crushing down on a skull. That's disgusting. It's awful. It would just be a very uncomfortable thing to do. This is a fun moment in the film. It then leads to them running up to the rooftop to one of the worst things I've seen in a while. I cannot believe this is in the trailer where they drop off the side of the roof and then the cat flies up at the camera and then back down. It looks awful. Why is that a selling point? Why are they trying? This is why the movie's bombing because they put shots like that in the commercial. You need to lead people down a better path. It might also be bombing because it presents itself as a film starring Henry Cavill and Dua Lipa for a good majority of that trailer. And that's the only part they're in. They never show up again outside of Henry once in a while in a figment of her imagination. But after that first eight to 10 minutes, if even that long, he's maybe in it for another two minutes total. It's bad. It's a bad misdirect. The other big twist in the movie is that Catherine O'Hara is actually another evil double agent person. She's not really Bryce Dallas Howard's mom. She and Brian Cranston's character are the main villains and they brainwashed her after she fell out as an agent. They took her in while she was in a coma and when she woke up, they pretended to be her parents and they raised her and to being scared of everything but keeping those core memories intact so that they could spill the beans because she has the codes or something that they need to do something else. And I don't know. I kind of lost the plot at that point. It didn't matter. I'm just here for action now and nothing more. Side note, I think I referred to Catherine O'Hara as Catherine O'Hara earlier. That's on me. I'm not going to go back and fix it. You can either correct me ahead of time in the comments and then get to this point in the video and say, oh wow, he actually, he corrected it himself. He got, he got there. Good for him. Catherine O'Hara plays a good villain. She has a British accent for a second, which is kind of funny. Later in the game, Blinken, you'll miss Samuel L. Jackson who shows up in literally every movie ever. You just don't know. He could be in the background drinking some porridge. He could be voicing a cutesy little worm in a film. Samuel Jackson's around. You just have to look hard enough and you'll find him. Here he plays the good guy agent. I don't know his name. I could, I could look it up but I don't really, yeah, it's not showing up and I'm DB on the first page and that's enough, that's enough research for me. He's, he's fine. He's Samuel L. Jackson. Just kind of being cool, kind of being present and that's all you need. He's going to be spending the entirety of this movie in a vineyard at a chateau where he will sit at a computer for 90% of the movie, getting excited when they almost hack something and then sad when it doesn't get hacked fully. Let's get to the point where this movie goes off the rails and onto the ice skates as Ellie Conway laces up for some oil skating action. I was very much getting shades of the Long Kiss Good Night with Gina Davis, a movie that a lot of people haven't seen. Director of Cliffhanger, Die Hard 2, Remy Harleen directed that bad boy. I love that film, Long Kiss Good Night which also stars Samuel L. Jackson is basically the same thing as this. Gina Davis's character has amnesia. She's playing the good housewife until something happens and her memories start flooding back in and she realizes she's an assassin. Hell, I'm willing to say this is kind of a ripoff of that movie because Bryce Dallas Howard's character even does the slicked back blonde hair dye. It's the exact same thing Gina Davis's character does. She starts up Burnett, ends up cutting all of her hair and going blonde with a real short cut. It's the same movie. Except for Gina Davis is a badass in the role and she pulls it all off in such a believable way whereas again here it's not working one to one and this scene where she's there's a sequence where a bunch of oil starts leaking out all over the floor so the bad guys can't shoot or they'll blow everything up. Well, Bryce Dallas Howard fashions together some skates and she starts sliding on the ice and cutting off, you know, not cutting off. They can't really show anything because it's PG-13 but she's slicing and dicing these guys. It is a fantastic sequence. I think you just would have worked so much better if we had a character that was a little bit more athletically built and this wasn't just so out of nowhere. This character goes from zero to hero in a second flat. There's no like slow growth. She's not chopping an onion and getting better and better. It really is riding a bike one to one for her and whatever. I enjoyed this sequence a lot. I also thought the sequence where they throw smoke grenades and they're all these wild colors and our lead protagonist are dancing with each other and shooting guys left and right. It was fun. It was very stupid and I can totally understand why people hated the shit out of this movie and by the time it ends we're on an oil rig outside. There's more action. I'm completely drained. The movie's two and a half hour. It's two hours in 20 minutes long. It's so long. It's so unnecessary long for what it's doing. And I think that's it. She kind of embraces the author role that she has continues on with the series of Argyle and then we get the final reveal where a super fan in the audience stands up and it's Henry Cavill with a bad wig. And she looks perplexed like I know you I've been seeing visions of you as Argyle. I don't know what any of this means. I'm not sure what that ending was supposed to represent or what cliffhanger thing. I think it was just supposed to be like a whoa shocking moment without any subtext at all. Okay, I think I hit all the major plot points in this film. That's Argyle a very mixed bag for me. I can see people loving every minute of it. I can see people loving the fucking hell out of it. If I could throw some efforts in for no reason. I'm kind of in the middle on this one. I liked it more than I didn't. I liked it more than I didn't but I would not recommend it to a lot of different people. I know you got to be a certain type of sick weirdo to enjoy this and I guess I kind of them. All right. Let me know if you saw Argyle. Leave a comment below. Let me know if I miss a major thing that I'm just not recollecting. It's a long movie. Like the video. Please again hit the notification bell. Subscribe. Do all that stuff. Do a lipa all that stuff. And I'll see you real soon. All right. Take care.