Argylle transcript
Season 1 · Episode 5. Generated automatically, so expect the odd misheard word.
Hello and welcome to the Worst Movie Podcast. I'm Ade.
And I'm Aaron and this is a podcast where we watch really bad movies and we try to find something that we like
just a couple of guys who happen to have microphones and know each other through marriage. We're not married, to be clear. We just know each other I married his sister a long time ago, and that's how we know each other. And we like to watch movies and talk about them. Hope you enjoy.
Okay.
Yes.
today we're concluding our September series of Modern Messes. All recent movies that bombed in one way or the other. Today, our movie is Argyle came out in 2024, directed by Matthew Vaughan and starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell and Henry Cavill streaming on Apple TV.
Aaron, do you have a quick movie synopsis for us?
Yeah, Argyle is a reclusive author who writes espionage about a secret agent, and a global spy syndicate realizes that the plot of the new book she's writing starts to mirror real world events in real time.
Yeah. So this movie, like I said, came out last year sitting at 33 % on Rotten Tomatoes, a 2.3 average rating on Letterbox. It earned a 96 million at the box office before going to Apple TV streaming. It is rumored to have needed 500 million to break even at the box office.
office bomb. do you remember much about
movie coming out? Any of the rumors it?
I remember seeing the trailers for it when it came out and being encouraged and intrigued. thought that the cast looked really good, but I did not see it at the time. I remember thinking that it was going to be the reviews seemed to indicate.
Yeah, there was a lot of hype behind this movie. remember reading about it even before the trailers were out that there was a rumored book deal for Ellie Conway, who was presumably the writer behind a novel called Argyle that she had sold
the movie rights to Argyle before the novel was even published. And there was all this hype around it people couldn't figure out who Ellie Conway was, that she wasn't an established author. And there were rumors on Twitter and around the internet that Taylor Swift was actually Ellie Conway, that she was writing the movie.
novel Argyle under a pen name and these theories were all because Taylor Swift owns a cat similar to the cat that Ellie Conway has in the movie and so Taylor Swift fans were like it's because of that and then I think a bunch of other small came out that tied people to the suspicion that Taylor Swift was behind all this.
Taylor Swift is the only person that can be associated with the Scottish Foldcat.
Yeah. But that, that was enough to generate all sorts of hype behind this movie. And then of course, come to find out Taylor Swift isn't attached to it at all. And Ellie Conway was the character in the movie Argyle. I assume it was a deliberate marketing ploy to get people excited about the movie.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would guess so. We're continuing our cats theme from last week too, by the way. Yeah. Works out. Yeah.
Yeah. And Taylor Swift thing, I guess. So not nice, nice tie in.
should say before we get started talking about the movie itself, spoiler alert, we're going to spoil the whole movie. And this is maybe first movie we've covered so far where I will say, if you want to watch this movie and think you might enjoy this movie, the spoilers do matter because there are a lot of twists in this movie. And I would say.
This movie is really all about the twist and maybe I've already spoiled it by telling you there to us in this movie because it doesn't seem like that at the start. But anyway, we start the movie with agent Argyle. Why don't you Aaron tell us what's happening in this first scene?
a scene where we're kind of dropped into the middle of it. Agent Argyle is played by Henry Cavill He's in this kind of ballroom are dancing and basically gets double crossed It seems like we're just being dropped into kind of a classic cheesy spy where
The whole room turns and points their guns at him they got him at that point, but, ⁓ yeah, it's, there's this really weird scene with Dua Lipa where she, she just dances with him and they do this move called the whirly bird where he picks her up and.
She rides backwards on his shoulders with her legs in the air and they spin I Have not done the is that a real dance move?
Have you ever done the Whirlybird?
I wasn't familiar with this dance move before this movie. Maybe it has a different name in other cultures or within the dance community, but I'm a fan. It seems like a fun dance.
This isn't the only scene in the movie that contains the Whirlybird dance move either.
Chekhov's Whirlybird dance move, I should say.
Yeah, and so he eventually he has a he has this person in the chair for him that causes a distraction and he he gets out and to this chase scene through Greece Where do Aleepa's character is running he is trying to chase her down through the streets of Greece and was not
very riveting for me. didn't think, what did you think of the scene?
I loved the scene. Yes. So it starts out there dancing to a Barry White song, which just plus one love that love the song. And the whole scene is super over the top parody of any sort of James Bond, you know, spy genre, as you said, which is a genre that's very dear to my heart. But I love how over the top and cheesy it is. It's clearly.
WHAT?!
Yeah.
it's winking at itself and agent Argyle himself looks kind of weird. has this weird flat top looking hairdo and a weird suit jacket that kind of goes throughout the movie. It's a weird costume. It's a weird choice for him. Yeah. And then, uh, yeah, there's bad CGI and it's like bad, cheesy dialogue and all that, but I loved it. thought I was like, okay, I'm
It's velvet suit jacket, I think.
all in for a movie that's laughing and winking at the spy genre.
Yeah, I thought that the in cheek kind of winking at itself nature did work better in this scene when it's right at the beginning and you don't know what kind of movie you're getting into. I think that the kind of novelty Wears off pretty quick.
And it's not very consistent through the movie. like this opening scene, I didn't hate it at the time, but in looking back at it, I didn't think that this kind of satirical spy genre, plotline throughout the movie. I don't, I don't think it worked very well the action sequence at the beginning,
You realize pretty quickly that, this is poking fun at spy genre plots. But, you know, I think that there are plenty of silly spy genre movies that you can get that from that are better than than this.
yeah, this is jumping ahead a little bit, but one of the things I didn't like about the movie is that we had in my, in my mind, this great opening scene that we learn is actually scene from Ellie Conway's book. Ellie Conway is the main character and we're,
getting a peek into what's happening in her book, but we don't actually get a scene like this at all throughout the rest of the movie. And I think the idea of interspersing kind of this fake world that she's writing about with the real world that she's living through her own spy narrative would have been actually kind of funny and interesting if it would have been paired the right way. But I kind of didn't like that this was just a one-off.
Yeah.
Yeah, the way that they kind of use this argyle character played by Henry Cavill through the rest of the movie is almost like like Ben's force ghosts from Star Wars where he just kind of appears and gives some wisdom and then disappears. This is the only real scene where we get to see like action from Henry Cavill's character.
You
Yeah,
yeah, he doesn't have much to work with the rest of the movie at all. It just, like you said, a couple, a couple one-off lines.
So we find out that this is part of her book by, you know, it cuts to her at a book reading and she's reading this chapter to a crowd in a bookstore in Colorado. So that takes us kind of out of the first scene and kicks us right into Ellie's Life by Bryce Dallas Howard.
So the first scene that we really see her after this is in her house, which is this massive like cabin on the, the lake somewhere in Colorado. I don't know. It's an incredible house and she's seemingly she's there by herself And there's a shot where she walks from her kitchen across
kind of like a dining area into her living room. And I counted, she has over 20 lamps lit in her, like lights on in her, in her, this one room. has 20, over 20 lamps, two candles and a fire going in her house. I'm like, who lives like this? I like normally movies kind of, you know, they get crazy with their, their ambient lighting and their mood lighting and scenes, but this felt over the top.
You
didn't notice that, that's pretty funny.
They went overboard on the lighting budget for this scene.
she sets up that scene by saying she had a hot date and her hot date is actually her writing alone with her cat. What I found interesting about that scene is she gets on a call with her mom and her mom is giving her notes on the novel that she's writing. Is this the fifth novel in the series, in the Argyle series? ⁓
Cat
Mm-hmm.
think so.
How would you like to write a novel with your mom? That seems like a hellish proposition.
I love my mom, I'll start with that at the top. ⁓ And I think that my mom is an incredibly creative person. I don't know that I would be a good collaborative partner with my mom in that scenario.
Same here, same here.
Yeah, it seemed even within that movie, a weird choice that you would collaborate so closely with your mother on this spy novel.
Her
mom is played by Catherine O'Hara.
Yeah, who is great. I love Catherine O'Hara.
I love, yeah,
I love Catherine O'Hara. so in this scene was like, these people have no chemistry. And I didn't think so, I thought dialogue in this movie was rearing its ugly head early, I thought.
Ha ha.
Which is weird because I feel like we're going to explain all the the twist to you, but the twists make it weird because all the criticism I had in the first part of the movie ended up getting unwound because of the twists later. So we learn, for example, that her mom actually isn't her mom. And so that might explain some of the weirdness and why her mom is so overbearing and
intrusive inner life?
It felt, and it felt to me, her mom felt like in the Truman show, his wife, when she would do the ad segments, do you remember that? Like the coffee or whatever? It felt like she was putting it on, you know? Like it felt performative, which does make sense if later in the movie we find out that she's not who she says she is. But.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we go from Ellie's house to she gets on a train to go see her mom because she's afraid of flying. So she's going to take a train from Colorado to Chicago. And then we get introduced to Sam Rockwell.
Yes. So my note at this point was that I, so far I like the soundtrack of the movie. They had the Barry White song and I thought that the soundtrack up to this point was working. But yeah, so she's on the train.
Sam Rockwell's character comes up and takes the seat and he's like this haggardly, scruffy, seemingly like transient kind of person that is reading her book that she wrote. And he realizes that it's her some point and, you know, starts fangirling that he loves her books and
And then he very quickly tells her that she is in danger and that he's a spy and everyone on this train is there to kill her. And there is action sequence that follows
Yeah.
I'm already a Sam Rockwell fangirl, but I thought he was the best part of this movie. He just cooked throughout.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah, I think that he's good in almost everything I've seen him in. I don't think he had a whole lot to work with with this movie. And he did the best that he could with it, bringing some like charisma to.
maybe a tropey or stereotypical character.
also briefly see, characters played by Brian Cranston and Rob Delaney. I really like Rob Delaney and was excited to see him on screen. he's, Brian Cranston's characters, number two in the scene. And Brian Cranston picks up a shotgun and starts threatening.
Rob Delaney and kills him after like 15 seconds of screen time. So my note was, welp, I guess I don't get to see Rob Delaney in this movie.
Yeah.
Yeah,
he was killed right at the top.
Yeah, for no reason, basically. I know HR works differently in spy organizations, but I think if you just straight up murder somebody in the office when they don't deliver on a project, that that's going to create some morale issues.
Yeah, the beatings will continue until morale it was kind of, I didn't think that Bryan Cranston, I think, plays a great villain. We all know this. I don't think that he was very threatening in this. It seemed campy and, yeah, I don't know. It wasn't working for me.
Yeah,
we'll get back to Bryan Cranston a few more times, I'm sure.
So through this whole series of scenes it basically becomes clear to the audience that there are real spies who need Ellie Conway the author for her imagination. That she's such a great writer that they want her to help explain what's happening in the real world with these spy threats. I would say at that point in the movie it lost me. I was like this is
This doesn't make any sense. is way too much of a stretch.
do we know Rockwell's character with CIA or.
That was one of my questions for the end. I, he's just a spy. we know eventually that he works with the retired CIA director, but I don't know that the retired CIA director played by Samuel L. Jackson is actually working with the CIA at all or
He's just a spy.
It doesn't seem
like it.
No, he's retired. They make that clear. He does spy stuff and watches basketball games and makes wine in France. That's what he does. And then Sam Rockwell works with them, but I don't think anybody else is in that organization. It's just, yeah, it's just the two Sams and then Ellie Conway, Bryce Dallas Howard, character. So we don't know who is.
Yeah
what it seems like.
Yeah.
but there are dozens of spies also trying to kidnap Ellie Conway for her imagination.
Yeah, and these these other spies are from a group called the Division. Which seems to be run by Brian Cranston's character director Ritter. they're both competing to get to Ellie because she is writing things that are happening in real time in their line of work. So they're like she must know something or she's.
Plugged in somehow or she's this savant or she's channeling it somehow so they they want to get to her to pick her brain.
Yeah, like I said, this is where the movie started to lose me. But then we learn, let's just say 30 minutes or 45 minutes later that this is not actually why they're trying to capture her. And we'll get to that twist then, but then in retrospect, it's like, well, I spent so much of this movie believing that this was what this movie was about. And the twist doesn't even result in a payoff where I feel like
I feel like they would have done something differently given the reality of who Ellie was and why they were looking for. The whole train fight scene doesn't really make a lot of sense. It just, falls apart on its face and then it falls apart once the twists are revealed.
Yeah, I would agree that I think the twists start to lose me at some point because they just start to come rapid fire. Yeah, and there's you can't follow the logic when there's that many twists and turns. You can't be like, this character was acting this way at the beginning of the movie because this is the twist secretly that their motivations are different.
There are too many twists.
When there's 14 twists to the movie, it stops to make any sense and it's too confusing to try to follow the plot at that point.
I think they tried to write it that way to be funny in some ways. There's some twists that are almost comical. Maybe I just took it that way because by the end of the movie, it's just like, well, just give me another fucking twist because might as well. We've, we've seen, we've seen 20 of them so far. What's another one? Let's resurrect some dead characters just because twist they, you know, whatever, but yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The movie starts to fall apart. so Sam Rockwell gives a bunch of spy mumbo jumbo in terms of what's happening and they have to get to London to find this hacker who's going to hack this by satellite or something. don't know. It also started to lose me in the mumbo jumbo.
this big scene at the hacker's lair where they fight a bunch of other spies. What was your note on that scene?
My note is I don't know why the dialogue is bad, but I know it is. I guess this is what makes me just a regular guy and not a film critic, but I know good dialogue when I hear it. And this was not good dialogue. So I don't know. It doesn't make sense
Hahaha
Yeah.
I
I did write down some dialogue from that scene. I don't remember the context now, but the quote was, I think it was Ellie saying, that was convenient. And I wrote it down because not only was it bad dialogue, but it seemed like the writers created some situation that was convenient for the characters and then felt bad about it. So I had the characters comment on how bad the was.
Yeah, she might as well just said, oops, that was lazy writing.
Yeah, just breaking the fourth wall, looking at the audience and saying, sorry guys, but we had to move from point A to point B.
Yeah.
Yeah, look straight into the camera. Can you believe this shit?
Yeah,
they get this notebook from the hacker and I just happened to pause to go to the bathroom or get a drink or something at the point where Sam Rockwell's character is looking through this notebook and I just had to laugh. You have to go look at that notebook because it's just all this. It's perfect movie hacker gibberish. There are these IP addresses listed in this notebook that don't
follow IP address format. There's all sorts of just weird hexadecimal numbers that it just, loved it as a, as somebody from the tech industry. I was just like, yeah, this is perfect. This was, this was somebody, this was an English major who put together this notebook.
Yeah, they did not consult anyone in tech for any part of this or probably anyone in the espionage game for this movie.
Yeah, certainly not.
we get a scene where He's talking on the phone in a hotel room
the bathroom with the door open and he says something about to put a bullet in her head and so it switches and we're like yeah he is the bad guy so yeah and maybe i think that's the first major twist of the movie where nope sam rockwell's character is bad
Yeah.
First twist of the movie. Well, maybe.
we cut to the next scene. Her parents have arrived in London, pretty quickly.
And
then we get Sam Rockwell coming back and no, he's the good guy again.
Yeah, so he shows up and starts holding Bryan Cranston at gunpoint.
Brian Cranston starts holding Ellie at gunpoint. And then Catherine O'Hara comes up behind Ellie and grabs her by the neck and puts a gun to her head and everybody's pointing a gun at each other. I don't even remember how the scene
Well, Catherine O'Hara is shot and seemingly dies, but spoiler alert, she isn't dead. She had a bulletproof vest on. And then somehow.
Yes.
Yeah. Yes.
Somehow Ellie and Sam escape together.
it's all twisty and he takes her to Sam Jackson's vineyard in France.
the plot is so convoluted at this point that it's so hard to follow. And it feels like it's kind of a hacky spy story that knows it's hacky, but is still trying to play every scene straight.
Yeah.
Exactly. Yeah, that's a good point because I feel like if this was if this was the tone of that first scene with Argyle where it's just a parody of spy movies and winking at the audience, maybe it would be really fun, but it it tries to play it straight and serious, at which point it's just a really bad spy movie.
Right.
Yeah, like we know that Argyle a character and so it's fun and campy and but then they try to play the real life scenes with Ellie is like serious, but it's it retains the same like hacky spy movie tropes that are what make the Henry Cavill side fun. But when you play it straight as like there's real consequences and Ellie's life is actually in danger and
You know her home life is a wreck. It's not ⁓ it's not funny and it's not fun. It's like they're trying to play it serious, but it's also so ridiculous and unbelievable that it's are you are you expecting us to emotionally connect with this somehow?
Yeah.
Yeah,
it's not Austin Powers and it's not James Bond. It's somewhere in the middle where it's like, I don't know whether to laugh at this or feel that there's real danger and feel suspense and intrigue.
Yeah.
and there's this scene where they're traveling in the car to the the. vineyard where we meet Sam Jackson. Where? The music is way too emotional. I don't know if you remember this scene, but I'm like we just went through like cheesy spy. Tropes and she's in this scene like trying to. To reconcile this somehow and the.
No, I don't.
Music is so emotional like when you love somebody anymore and they still love you and they're like trying to get you to feel something and you're like, I'm done. don't, I don't know. I'm done with this movie. So yeah, I don't know. It was the music was trying to make me feel something and, Bryce Dallas Howard was doing her best to make me feel something. And it was, I was checked out.
Hahaha.
over here. What did you think of Samuel L. Jackson?
Yeah.
it was, I like Samuel L Jackson. It was a fine cameo for him. His character is this over the top kind of charismatic, retired CIA director that makes wine and is also super into basketball. but like, I mean, his character felt like
Ha ha.
you know a credit card commercial that he might be in. Whereas pretty one note and it's a it's a brief appearance, but I thought he was fine. I wasn't expecting much out of his
I hated the vineyard scene, the setting. He's in this barn where he has wine and then it opens up to his office, which is supposed to be this spy lair. And Bryce Dallas Howard says, what is all this? And what it is, is a big screen TV and a stock ticker for some reason going by.
Yeah.
the top of the TV. Why? Why he has a stock ticker. And then he has two iPads on a desk that he uses to control the TV. I don't know if you noticed there's scenes later where he has the spy software or some shit and he's like using both hands on his iPad to like punch in buttons. And I'm like, I don't know that I know I shouldn't be so critical about that sort of thing, but just give somebody.
You
a good old keyboard and mouse and regular operating system and not take us out of this movie.
What are we supposed to think he does? Like, I thought that maybe he was betting on games or something in the...
He's day trading apparently.
Yeah, well, that's the thing. Why is the ticker not sports scores or something? Since it seems into... So we're supposed to believe he's into spy craft, winemaking, sports, and the stock market. And he does all of that from this one barn.
Yeah.
I
My
takeaway was that the production designer was like, you know what would make him seem really smart and spy like is a stock ticker.
Yeah. Okay.
because there were no,
there was no mention about the markets or financial wizardry or anything. think they were, no, I think, I think, you know what it probably was. I think they had all this shit up on the wall to make him seem like a cool spy. And I think Samuel L Jackson just got bored and started watching some basketball and they kept that in.
They don't even mention the basketball games.
Like it wouldn't surprise me if they just filmed this at Samuel L. Jackson's home and that's what he was doing that day.
Yeah, yeah, he just had his feet kicked up on the desk.
There was a scene here where he's talking about the grapes and about how, you know, this Pinot Noir grape is the same grape, but you can plant it, all over the world and it becomes something different. That the Pinot Noir that we know is a product of what happened to it and that that's true for her, that she might be something, but she's a product of
the events in her life and where she came from and things like that. And I thought that that was like, honestly, as a metaphor, it kind of works.
Yeah, it was kind of a roundabout way to the biggest twist of the movie where we learned that Ellie Conway actually is Argyle and she's been brainwashed slash amnesiad for the last five years. And she was actually one of the world's best secret agents,
for the last five years, she's been amnesia into becoming a bestselling author. And so we get this fight sequence where she's like slowly learning her powers as she fights Sam Rockwell. what did you think about this twist?
Her real name was Rachel Kyle or R Kyle
Just so stupid. ⁓ Yeah, it was trying to be Jason Bourne here where she's having this awakening of abilities and memories and powers that she didn't know she had, but it was stupid. It was so stupid.
Hahaha
she becomes Argyle again, and we go to some Arabian palace. I got really lost in the mumbo jumbo of why they were there, she's all slick back hair.
nice dress, some half-assed physical transformation, let me say, into the secret agent. And I guess just not very believable for me that she all of a sudden is this great hand-to-hand combat spy. I don't know. It just didn't work for me. How about you?
Well, there's this that I think is just so stupid. When she finds out that she's a spy, she's talking to Sam Rockwell's character, Aiden. She's like, why? Why wouldn't you tell me why all the lies? And he was like, well, we had to let your memories come back naturally or else you could lose everything. Like, well, you just showed her that she's a spy. You showed her her dossier. You didn't let anything come back naturally. You're like.
Here go. Here's your field agent report. You're secretly a spy They wrote it because it sounds good, but it doesn't line up with anything that actually happens in the movie and. Her transition to the spy character is just silly.
Yeah.
if it hasn't fallen apart already, it really falls apart in terms of understanding, even thinking back in the movie of why people's motivations were what they are. and just the whole, I, I'm not a scientist. I don't know much about brain stuff, but you know, you have to do a lot of suspension of disbelief to think that this
spy agency would spend five years propping her up as this, world famous author in order to extract this information other than any other mechanism.
Yeah.
where learned she was hypnotized by Catherine O'Hara and Bryan Cranston by showing her a video of spinning circles on a laptop in her hospital bed.
Yeah.
And playing this music box, but they did all this in order out from her where the secret, key, what was the object that they, oh yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
It was a silver bullet. It was a USB
drive that was in a, it looked like a silver bullet and it contained all of the agent information for the division.
But if you have the powers to hypnotize somebody into for five years believing that they're an author and write these novels in order to get to where is the silver bullet, couldn't you just hypnotize them into telling you where the silver bullet is?
Yeah, mean it seems like you can just hypnotize them over the web by getting them to watch a YouTube video of some spinning circles.
It would have been so much cheaper and easier than all the personnel it took or hypnotize them into doing some job where they're at the division the whole time, rather than having to chase them on a train and murder innocent civilians and create this whole spectacle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's insane. Cranston and Katherine O'Hara. Why didn't they just call her in? earlier like why?
yeah, he thought she thought they parents. At some point they could have just had a nice dinner and said, Hey, Ellie, by the way, imagine a scenario where you're going to write a novel about a secret, a silver bullet. Where would that silver bullet be? And then, you know, just write it for them. it was a final twist too far, but
Yeah.
It was not a final twist though, even like really.
No, no, we have more twists, but I'm just saying that was a twist where I was just like, yeah, this is getting to be, I mean, I guess I said that already about the parents, but yeah, too many twists is the headline. I don't know where I would have stopped with the twist, but this was too many.
That was the Twisty Fire.
Well, there's
another twist coming right behind it and that we learn that Aiden and. Rachel Kyle Argyle were lovers. And they were partners and lovers as spies.
Yes,
we get the dance scene where she is the Dua Lipa doing the Whirlybird move with Sam Rockwell.
Yeah, I wrote down is Sam Rockwell required to dance in everything now? I feel like I meant to look this up, but I feel like 10, 15 years ago he danced in something and I was like, wow, Sam Rockwell is a great dancer. And now I think everything I see him in he dances. I mean,
Hahaha
Was
it that movie where he played, He played like a game show host or a talk show host?
Chuck Barris, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
Yeah. I feel like ever since then he must've gotten some killer dance lessons for that. Now every director wants to use them. ⁓ we get another twist where she was rogue the whole time and she was a double agent working for the division. So we get to our final set of scenes where.
Yeah.
We're at division headquarters. And then we get another twist where it's like, no, she was double agenting. She was a triple agent. She was just fooling the division into thinking she was a double agent. And we get a sequence where she's uploading a file to Samuel L Jackson's character.
she partners back with Aiden to fight against the division. What did you think about all the division stuff?
Is this
before or after she shot him?
She shot him at the division headquarters. They were interrogating him and yeah, she shot him, which is an important plot point.
this is where we learn about the vascular corridor, Yeah.
Biology lesson. Did
you look up whether or not this is real? I mean, not that I would ever attempt this in a million lifetimes, but I'm curious if it's even anywhere near feasible.
No.
So we learned that there is a fan who wrote in a to Ellie at some point that was like, here's an idea for a story There's this thing called a vascular corridor, which is like a two inch section through the middle of your heart or chest area where you could be shot in that area. And it looks you're dead, but it actually will hit nothing, which scientifically, I don't know if that stands up. It feels.
Haha
It was wrong. seems like bullshit. so she shoots Aiden's character really dramatically, but it turns out he's actually perfectly fine. I don't think you can have anything go through your body from one side to the and out the other and you're OK, but he seemed OK.
I mean, he's,
he's not only fine, he's in peak physical condition, able to do hand to hand combat with dozens of thugs
Yeah.
there's this whole dance sequence where the Whirlybird comes back and they're doing the Whirlybird to like kill off agents coming from different hallways. What did you think of that sequence? I thought it could have been cool.
In the right movie. This was in a better movie. It could have worked. ⁓ So I saw something about this where the director of this movie also did the Kingsman. Movies yeah and. Yeah kick ass so. He can make good movies in this genre and I saw somebody say that this sequence felt like it should have been in a Kingsman movie.
Hahaha
Yeah.
Yeah, Matthew Vaughn. Yeah, and kick ass and...
Yeah.
And I would agree with that. didn't fit this movie, but I think that this movie is this. This movie took a million tropes and threw all of them against the wall and none of it stuck, I think. But this was one of those tropes that. They tried and it failed. I think it's it's very colorful. It's, you know, choreographed.
Dance fighting?
we get basically three or four climax action scenes. There's the colorful dance one. There's the next one, which is the oil tanker ice skating. My notes. I had so many notes. First of all, why is there oil? They're shooting at each other and oil is leaking onto the ground. And I'm like, wait a second. Why is there oil in the division headquarters, which apparently they're on an oil tanker in the middle of the ocean, international waters again.
Ugh.
Yeah, I-
But why
an oil tanker? Why is this there? They had to share office space with an oil rig.
I don't know. And they also had this like Matrix style gear up sequence at the beginning where they're in this room full of guns. You know, I need guns, lots of guns. They have this scene where it's like, they're just trying shit they've seen in other movies that they think will work and none of it does. And then the oil scene, I think made me irrationally angry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
so bad.
Yeah, I was was mad. I have some all caps in my notes.
Yeah, what is your note? What do you have?
Well, I mean, I guess for more context, she looks to Sam Rockwell and is like, wait, can I actually ice skate? Because that's something that she was told. And she was like, and he was like, yeah, you can ice skate. And she was like, okay, good. And she slapped some, she, she steps on some knives so that her boots become ice skates and she skates through all this oil.
I had visions of yeah
to kill the bad guys. I mean, my cast were like, ice skates don't work like that. I'm not like, I'm, it's not ice even. mean, but yeah. Yeah. It becomes a cartoon and.
No!
It's so aggressively stupid that it's infuriating.
in terms of not just how ridiculous it is, but even visually, it's very CG'd at this point. And it's like a cartoon in that all of these bad guys line up for her to like knock them over like bowling pins. And then she does this like whirly bird move or whatever where she's like spinning and yeah, and just firing her machine gun.
printing and killing.
haphazardly and killing all the bad guys and it's like, yeah, it's ridiculous.
This
is not like hockey skating. It's not like utilitarian, I'm gonna beat the shit out of you skating. It's choreographed dance, like figure skating. On knives, with knives in her hands, and then later with a gun. I hated it. I hated this scene.
Yeah, she's figure skating.
Yeah. And it wasn't to what we talked about earlier, wasn't done winking at the audience or like a, you know, in a hyper stylized satirical way, ⁓ it was, this is, this is how we get our heroes out of this mess.
No.
Yes. Yeah, it was horrible. I hated
And then we get Brian Cranston saying, if you want something done right after he's watching, probably would you say 50 to a hundred trained henchmen die at the hands of our two heroes? He walks down to the basement with a shotgun. And I was, I was like,
Yeah.
Why are they scared of him all of a sudden?
Yeah, I don't know. my impression was that she basically just killed the entire division. Like that had to have been most of the organization, at least the muscle side of it. Yeah, and he's supposed to be this badass for some reason. I don't know why.
They killed a lot of people.
saves the day from Cranston? We haven't even talked about this character yet.
The cat. The cat that's sitting in our backpack.
I don't remember. Oh my god!
So throughout this whole movie, has a cat,
Why is the cat there?
she has her cat Alfie in a backpack never seen a backpack like this before in real life. They exist. People actually carry cats around, like do cats actually stay calm? I mean, I can't imagine them staying calm through all these, you know, action scenes where people are shooting at them.
They exist. Yeah, they're real.
Some cats
She's running around and jumping off buildings and stuff.
Apparently at this moment Alfie the cat cracks and just goes ape shit on Bryan Cranston gouges his eyes out.
Yeah.
I don't.
Yeah, rips his eyes out. So I don't understand the purpose of the cat from the marketing of this movie and the trailer and everything else. She's carrying this cat fucking everywhere. It's a huge part of the movie. She talks to the cat like, you know, it's a partner, you know, she's asking like, what do you think about it? And, but the cat does nothing.
the whole movie except for scratching Bryan Cranston's eyes out
Like I thought that the cat in this movie was going to be a big character and it does nothing. I thought at least we'd be emotionally attached to it, but.
Yeah.
Ellie's character doesn't seem to be, at least in the oil fight where she thinks it's dead or it could be dead and she doesn't give a shit at all. She's just like, can you make sure he's okay? All right.
Well.
you're right. The cat does nothing. I don't think we as an audience have much attachment to the cat because we don't see the cat much except for through that backpack window. And it's just clearly an animated CG cat. It's not a real cat.
so the cat kills at least maims Brian Cranston. And then Ellie's able to send the silver bullet data to Samuel L. Jackson. there's a brief scene of Samuel L. Jackson watching basketball. And then he starts to get this transmission from the division tanker or whatever. And then it keeps getting interrupted.
I got mad at Samuel, like how they portrayed Samuel Jackson here or what they gave him. He became ice cube from of the worlds and just like a reaction. Jeff, he's just sitting there watching basketball, getting this
transmission. Yeah, watching it download and just yelling things like, God damn it, come on. When it gets cut off and then like banging on the desk happy when it starts transmitting again. And I was like, come on, this is, you know, I'm not going to say he's a male Jackson is like one of the finest actors of our generation or anything like that. Like maybe he doesn't have a ton of range, but like give them something more than just it's like
watching a download.
this creating this caricature out of him that is almost insulting in terms of like give the one black guy in the movie all these like you know stereotypical reactions.
Yeah, like, to me, it felt like it could be a capital one credit card commercial. Like. It was it was not. Much to work with for him, and it was kind of insulting for a character, an actor of his stature. I mean, I don't think that he is like on the list of greatest actors of all time, certainly, but we've all seen him act well in in good movies.
You
Sure.
And he's capable. This was not this was not that project.
Yeah.
And then we get the final twist of the movie. The.
Kieran, I think that's the character's name, She's back mysteriously on the ship and somehow knew right place, right time to kill Catherine O'Hara and snap Ellie back into reality. we get all of them boating away from the tanker and we get a shot of the tanker exploding in the background.
as Ellie and Aiden kiss. And then it like cuts to Henry Cavill as Argyle and John Cena as Aiden, which we haven't even talked about John Cena. I mean, he wasn't in there much.
Yeah, he's
like the partner to the Henry Cavill argyle character.
Yeah. were you expecting them to kiss too? The way that they set up that shot.
No, I didn't think about it, but that's funny in hindsight. I'd be into that,
It would have been awesome to see Henry Cavill and John Tynikis to mirror
Ellie and Sam Rockwell. ⁓
Yeah,
so we learned that the John Cena character is the same Rockwell character in real life. Me too. It would have made it better than it was.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wish they would have had the guts to do that in the movie.
Yeah. And then in the she finishes the book and, we get Henry Cavill at a, at a book signing book reading, standing up and saying, bet you have some questions for me, which, what was that supposed to be?
Yeah.
I don't know. I don't even understand the logic behind that. Does he know that he's Argyle? But she's Argyle. Does he know that he's the visual embodiment of her?
I think, yeah, I think so.
I guess it was just one more twist for the audience that it was like Let's just keep going to the last minute
Yeah,
this felt like a James Bond will return in. It felt like that, but it didn't make any fucking sense at all.
Yeah.
Well, did you catch the post credit scene? I don't know if any of these movies are going to come to fruition, but Matthew Vaughn originally his idea was to have a trilogy where the next movie would essentially be a movie of
Book one that Ellie wrote.
I'm really confused about this. So Aubrey Argyle is the character that we meet in this scene. It's not Henry Cavill. It's a younger version of Henry Cavill's character.
Right.
Yes, it's supposed to be the fiction. mean, obviously the movie we watch is fiction. So it's a little confusing, but it's supposed to be the fiction within the fiction that we're just supposed to see a regular spy movie that would be a movie based on the book that Ellie wrote.
And this scene takes place in a pub called the King's Man, which is the title of his next movie, I believe, in real life, the director.
So yeah, I read
something where not only does he, did he want to do an Argyle trilogy, but he wanted them to be connected to the Kingsman universe so that there'd be some overlap with Argyle the spy in Ellie's book and the Kingsman.
This plot is entirely too convoluted to then link it with another cinematic universe.
Ha ha ha ha.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know what. Yeah. Well, it lost somewhere around half a billion dollars. So I don't know if he'll get a budget for, for a sequel, much less the whole trilogy. what did we miss in the movie? Any other notes that you had?
That is insane.
You
I like the music. I don't know. I feel like I've kind of talked about my thoughts on most of it. The cat doing nothing in this movie was shocking to me. They also,
There's a scene where Ellie gets a chance to look at the silver bullet file like the was on it. And she does this dramatic cliffhanger of my God, we don't see what she's looking at. And then like five minutes later they do a flashback to the scene that we just watched of her looking at the thing like it's in black and white flash flashback. Like this. Do they think we forgot what just happened? I don't know.
Yeah.
This movie is so lazy and badly written that it's hard to feel anything other than contempt.
Tell us how you really feel.
one thought I had was at some point in the movie, you know, she's trans transforming from world famous author. guess she's really famous. seems like she's really successful. She has that nice, you know, house by the lake and she's written this series of novels and just five years that has taken the world by storm. And I was like, do we actually need another?
field operative. Like maybe it would be better to just keep her as an author. Yeah, like she's I imagine she's bringing a lot of joy to the world in a way that killing a bunch of henchmen isn't really good. Good for us as a society. I mean, I'm sure she's doing good as a spy, but maybe just leave her as a novelist.
Let her go. Yeah.
She seemed happy, maybe like lonely, but that also seems like she could be lonely because of the division and their control over her. I think if they just let her live her life, she would have been happy and had a much more fulfilling life.
Yeah.
Right. Yeah.
Do you think now that she's
with Sam Rockwell and they've gotten rid of the division that she could just go back to writing novels? Or has that been brainwashed out of her or like unbrainwashed?
don't know. So we get the scene at the end where she's at another book reading event. So she finishes her book and seems to slip back into that life.
Yeah, so she finishes her book, but she'd already.
Yeah, but she'd already written the book. She just hadn't published it yet. We start the movie with her finishing the final chapter of her next entry.
Also, she spent five years of her life, the previous five years to this movie, she spent like as a lonely author living a very regular life. And then all of a sudden she slips right back into the physicality of being a top flight secret agent.
Yeah.
No.
She wasn't working out as an author. She wasn't practicing her drills.
No! No!
Yeah, yeah, so I don't know. We're supposed to believe that she just slips right back into the spy side of her life. I'm guessing that she can just slip right back into the author.
Yeah, I guess so.
I would rather be the author than the spy, for sure.
Yeah,
I mean, it would be, I've always envisioned what my life would be like as a James type character, but you know, the threat of death and the stress of trying to save the world, probably not worth it compared to the joys of being a world famous author with five bestselling novels. I mean, that'd be pretty cool.
Yeah, and a
loyal following and a cat.
You
That'll
protect you to the death.
Yeah.
I have a note, 34,000 unread emails in her inbox. It seems like a lot. ⁓ she was very popular that, as an inbox zero guy, that gives me a lot of anxiety.
I didn't notice that. Yeah.
Yeah.
any other hot takes or insights burning questions?
I think that this might be the worst movie I've ever seen. Ugh.
Okay. Well,
well that segues well into verdict. What's your verdict of the movie?
You
I hated this movie. It was way too long. It was not funny at all. I don't think I laughed ever.
Yeah, it was.
was two hours and 20 minutes, so it was definitely long.
it was too long wasn't funny wasn't charming it wasn't sleek and Chic it was unoriginal it was every stereotypical Spy movie trope that you could imagine they used every single one of them in this movie spectacle no substance
I had no idea if it wanted to an action thriller parody, or if it wanted to be a rom-com. I think that it just failed at both. The script is terrible. The sets I didn't like. The CG was horrible. Despite the incredibly cast, the performances were bad, phoned in. And it was not so bad that it's good.
Yeah.
It was horrible.
was genuinely upset with how bad it was and how little I liked it.
yeah, that's pretty bad. I think I didn't hate it as much as you. I didn't like the movie, but
I think in watching it, there were times where I didn't like the movie I was watching, but I think I gave it maybe a little too much credit imagining it to be a different movie, if that makes any sense. yeah, my star rating would be two out of five stars. I didn't think it was the worst movie I'd seen. I still maybe put more of the world.
in the top spot, but you're right. It's not, it's actually, of the Worlds is so bad that I think it's a curiosity to watch again. Like not so bad it's good, but it's so bad that you should probably watch it to get that experience of watching such a bad movie. This is just, no, it's just a waste of time. I didn't get a lot of joy out of it the first five minutes I loved. If it was,
Like I said earlier, if it was a lot more of that, the like parody winking at the audience type movie, I would have enjoyed that or even an interspersed with the quote unquote real spy story that may have made it more enjoyable. But for the most part, it just dragged on too long. There were too many twists. was just twist on twist on twist that just made
the plot incomprehensible by the end of it, once you add it all up. And, ⁓ yeah, I, I did genuinely enjoy watching Sam Rockwell and his character. thought he did a good job in it and was charming, was funny, but I don't think anyone else really grabbed me.
Right.
Like there's no excuse for this movie to be even close to as bad as war of the world. in my eyes, war of the worlds, the fact that it stacks up against this movie is a credit to war of the worlds and
yeah.
Yeah, fair.
this movie should have been bland, not this bad.
Yeah, I imagine if you would have given War of the Worlds a $200 million production budget, it would have been a little something. it sometimes baffles me that you could have a scene like the oil tinker scene, which I'm sure took a lot of shooting, a lot of rehearsals, a lot of post-production and all the people involved.
And I'm just curious what they pictured it being because it was just atrocious what actually ended up on screen.
Yeah, you can't even tell what they're going for in that scene. I'm curious how much they spent on that bullshit, because that was... might have, well, just thrown the money away.
Yeah, yeah.
what would be your alternate picks? We always like to pick some alternate movies with either same themes, same cast, same director. What, what would you pick to watch instead of Argyle?
I think that this movie touched on so many movie tropes that if you like those, that this is such a rich selection of good movies that fit into this genre that I picked for. I have four movies and probably I could go more. ⁓ So I think if you like the slick, stylish,
Yeah.
Buddy spy action kind of comedy with Henry Cavill. You've already got the man from Uncle right there. Guy Ritchie. Jared Harris. It's it deserved a sequel, I think, and it's it's as a standalone movie. So much better. So much better than this. True lies. James Cameron, Tom Arnold, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bill Paxton.
Yeah.
Much better movie. If you want the writer, fiction aspect where life begins to reflect fiction, you've got stranger than fiction. Already exists. If you want absurd, self-aware parody kind of conspiracy mystery buddy cop type thing, the nice guys, Shane Black directed, which I think
Yeah, I like that movie.
Mm-hmm.
Shane Black probably has four or five movies that he's done himself that are right in this genre that are better than this. Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Last Action Hero. I think that there are so many movies in this genre that you could pick anything and it would be better than this.
you
Yeah.
Yeah. No, well said. All great pics.
my favorite thing from this movie was Sam Rockwell. So I'll just shout out Sam Rockwell and really enjoyed Moon. That's probably one of my favorite movies that he's in and matchstick men. love that movie and, ⁓ yeah, lots of, lots of good Sam Rockwell stuff out there.
Well, I think that's all we can say about Argyle for today. If you're listening to this, we would really appreciate if you subscribed to the podcast on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. we are obviously inexperienced podcasters and any sort of juice and likes and subscribes will help us out. if you want to reach out to us.
You can also hit us up at the worst movie podcast at gmail.com. Send us your feedback and comments and we'll try to get back to you I'm Ade
And I'm Aaron, thanks for listening to the Worst Movie Podcast.