Argylle

Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) writes spy novels about a man called Argylle (Henry Cavill), and Matthew Vaughn’s film opens inside one of them: Greece, a nightclub, Dua Lipa on a dance floor, a chase along a coast road that looks like a perfume advert. Then it cuts to Elly at a book reading, and the joke is that the woman who invents all this lives alone with a cat and takes the train. Jason Fuchs’s script has a real idea here, which is that her books have been predicting what actual spies get up to, and the actual spies have noticed. For half an hour that idea carries the film. Then the reveals start, and they do not stop for another hundred minutes.

The train is the best of it. Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell), unshaven and untidy, sits down opposite Elly and tells her she is in danger a few seconds before the carriage fills with people trying to prove him right. Elly, who has never seen a fight that was not on her own page, keeps seeing Argylle where Aidan is, and Lee Smith, Col Goudie and Tom Harrison-Read cut between Rockwell and Cavill mid-blow, so that a scruffy man throws a punch and a tidy one lands it. We laughed, properly, and we sat up. It is the one sequence in which the film’s device does something a plainer spy picture could not.

Rockwell and Howard are good together and the film knows it. He plays Aidan as a man mildly embarrassed by his own competence; she plays Elly as someone who would rather be at home and keeps saying so. Their scenes in cars and hotel rooms have a bickering ease that the plot keeps interrupting. Catherine O’Hara, as Elly’s mother Ruth, gets two scenes and does more with a raised eyebrow than the script manages in a reel.

The look is the first real problem. George Richmond shoots the Argylle sequences in postcard colour and the rest in a flat digital shine, and too often the actors are standing in front of backgrounds that were plainly added later, so a rooftop or a field has the depth of a screensaver. Daniel Taylor and Russell De Rozario’s sets, the agency’s headquarters and Elly’s house, are handsome and anonymous. Stephanie Collie dresses Cavill in suits so sharp they seem to be holding him up, and the flat-top haircut that goes with them is the film’s one unhesitating decision. Lorne Balfe’s score alternates brass and thump, and gives way to disco whenever the action needs to tell us it is fun.

Then the twists. We will not describe them, and there are enough of them that we could not if we tried. What we can say is that each one asks us to throw away something we have been told about a person, and by the fourth we had stopped bothering to hold on to anything. We noticed we had stopped, which is worse than being lost. Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson and Sofia Boutella arrive as the plot requires and leave when it is done with them. Cavill, first on the poster, is on screen far less than his billing suggests and spends the time being handsome at a distance.

Late on, Vaughn stages a fight in a corridor of coloured smoke as a kind of dance, and for a few minutes the film is what it wanted to be all along: silly, pretty, in time with its music. It comes after two hours, and it is a 12A fight, which means nobody bleeds and nothing quite connects. In Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), Vaughn put Colin Firth through a church full of people and made you feel every hit. Here the punches are thrown at a certificate.

The reviews so far are mostly hostile, and we are less angry than most, because there is a decent ninety-minute comedy in here about a woman who would rather be reading. At 139 minutes it has been buried. Watch it at home, where you can stop for the cat and skip the smoke. The cat, to be fair, is good.