Argylle (2024)

Plot of Argylle: We see a black clad guy and a glamourous young woman dancing before there is a lot of shooting and a motor cycle and Mini Moke chase. Then it is revealed that it is the end of Elly Conway’s fifth spy novel and she is reading to an audience of fans. Later she is in a train to visit her mother when there are attempts on her life, only foiled by a scruffy man who says he is a spy and, in time, that actually she is a spy. She has, apparently, suffered memory loss and her fiction work is reflecting the actual activities of a organisation called The Division, headed up by the formidable Ritter. Elly and Aidan, her rescuer, are chased across the world by multiple armed villains while they recover something called “The Master Key”. By this time we know a lot more about Elly’s parents, and find that she is actually a spy herself called Rachel Kyle, but who is her employer?

Content: No sex or nudity and maybe just a bit of background social drinking. The opening sequence consists of the fictional Argylle on a MiniMoke chasing a woman on a motor cycle, over the rooftops of a Greek seaside town. It is Elly reading from her latest novel. Elly speaks with her mother on the phone. Then on the train Aiden fights off multiple assassins, and there are further fire fight. Elly carries her cat in a backpack with a porthole for it to look out of (do such things exist?). We visit the headquarters of The Division where the fearsome boss Ritter, threatens people with death, and worse, if they don’t find the fleeing duo. At time we visit the semi-retired CIA director in the vineyards of France. There is a guest appearance of what might be the largest VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier) in the world.

A View: This has been a box office bomb, probably because there is just too much violence, presented in what seems to be an unstructured way. I ended up feeling sorry for the grunts being killed almost randomly.  Actually the stars do pretty well and Bryan Cranston is absolutely great, but we are faced with the problem that the film spoofs James Bond at his most spoofy, almost impossible to get away with. I hope I have not revealed too much of the plot, which actually I quite liked, and I am a fan of the director’s earlier work, so it saddens me to suggest that you should give this outing a miss.

Fun Fact: Apparently the cat backpack does exist. It is used by Taylor Swift.