The Big Picture
- Director Matthew Vaughn's thematic motif is his desire to make a James Bond movie, which is evident in his previous works and continues in his upcoming film Argylle.
- Argylle is a rare original project with a stacked budget aimed at grown-ups, marking a first in Vaughn's directorial career. It is relatively uncharted territory for both Vaughn and mainstream moviegoers.
- The plot of Argylle revolves around author Elly Conway, whose spy novels align with real spy missions, throwing her into a world of spies and murder. The trailer indicates that the film emphasizes violence and humor but with a more straightforward approach compared to Vaughn's previous films.
Many filmmakers have very clear motifs that separate their works from other directors. In the case of director Matthew Vaughn, his thematic motif across all his works is that this guy really really really wants to make a James Bond movie. That's not surprising given that Vaughn is a director from London, England born at the dawn of the 1970s, there's no doubt he grew up surrounded by all things 007. His 2011 superhero movie X-Men: First Class leaned heavily on costumes and sets reminiscent of the 1960s James Bond movies, while his trio of Kingsman features were all spy movies that evoked the wackiest installments of 007's escapades. Vaughn's fascination with spy movie pastiches continues with Argylle, his upcoming 2024 directorial effort that just dropped its first trailer.
Argylle is a rare thing in the modern movie landscape, a completely original project with a stacked budget aimed at grown-ups. Not only is that a scarce entity in the world of 2020s cinema, but it also makes Argylle a first in the directorial career of Vaughn. This is his first feature to not be based on pre-existing source material. Everything from Layer Cake to Stardust to the Kingsman trilogy that Vaughn helmed in the past was based on source material somebody else conjured up. This makes Argylle uncharted territory for both Vaughn and mainstream moviegoers. Let’s clear up some of that mystery by exploring just what is going on in the plot of Argylle.
What Is ‘Argylle’ About?
The plot of Argylle was kept close to the chest for years, which makes it interesting that the first trailer for the feature is so forthcoming with key plot elements. In a nutshell, Argylle concerns author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who’s famous for writing spy novels concerning the suave agent of espionage Argylle (Henry Cavill). A very unassuming lady, Conway's life is thrown into chaos when she has a chance encounter with stranger Aiden (Sam Rockwell) on a train, which plunges her into a world of spies and murder she never could've imagined. Turns out her books have aligned with actual elements of real spy missions and that's caught the interest of many interested parties, including a villainous figure played by Bryan Cranston.
There are still plenty of elements kept under wrap from the final version of Argylle, including what kind of roles actors like Ariana DeBose and Samuel L. Jackson are playing in the proceedings. However, the trailer makes it clear that this feature is shaping up to be right in line with other preceding Vaughn features in terms of emphasizing bone-crunching violence with zippy pieces of humor. Argylle, at least so far, seems to be missing the troublemaker streak that marked the first two Kingsman films and Kick-Ass. So far, the comedy of Argylle appears to emanate from plunging an unlikely figure like Conway into the world of relatively straightforward espionage rather than presenting a farcical vision of spies like in the Kingsman films.
The trailer also concludes with a tease of there being a “real” Argylle, though of course, that’s a reveal being preserved for the final film. The trailer also demonstrates that Vaughn continues to have an amusingly hostile relationship to household pets given how much danger Conway’s cat is put through during the trailer. Heck, the announcement teaser for this full trailer hinged entirely on the cat being thrown off a tall building, with no resolution given to assure viewers that the feline was safe! Between this and the murder of that sweet precious pug in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, it’s clear that one should not leave their pets alone in the same room as Matthew Vaughn. Who knows what horrible things he might put your parakeet or iguana through?
RELATED: Bryce Dallas Howard Is Thrown Into a World of Spies and Danger in First 'Argylle' Trailer
The Pre-Release Controversy Over ‘Argylle’s’ “Source Material”
Before the release of this trailer, the biggest piece of news associated with the existence of Argylle centered around initial news that it was based on a then-upcoming novel of the same name by an unknown author by the name of Elly Conway. In September 2022, a year before the first trailer for the feature was released, The Hollywood Reporter published a major piece asking who exactly this Conway person was. The outlet noted that there was no information online about first-time author Elly Conway and that writers scoring such big movie adaptation deals for their inaugural novels was incredibly rare. The Hollywood Reporter piece also highlighted that any attempt to get information out of Ballantine Books (the entity supposedly responsible for the actual Argylle novel) and a man claiming to be Conway's agent about this author's identity went nowhere.
Initially, this looked like an utterly baffling scenario that teased the presence of a successor to Thomas Pynchon in the pantheon of uber-reclusive authors. However, with the release of this trailer, all the puzzle pieces have fallen into place regarding this author's identity. Elly Conway is the fictional author Bryce Dallas Howard plays in Argylle. The initial posturing that the movie was based on a piece of literature was a way of subtly establishing the feature's plot in plain sight. The evasiveness of Ballantine Books and that agent did not speak to an author who refused to connect to the larger world, but rather entities waiting for the go-ahead from Matthew Vaughn for when they could talk about this charade. It’s a marketing angle that demonstrates the unique possibilities original movies offer up for drumming publicity. Everybody knows every possible long-established character that could appear in a Superman or Mario movie, but an original title like Argylle can unveil its protagonist’s name without anyone realizing it. When nobody knows anything about your property, untold opportunities open up for how you can get people buzzing about your project.
Whether or not Argylle as a movie will generate this much hoopla among the general public is a question that still has no answer. However, Vaughn appears confident that this project will prove beloved enough to sustain a lengthy multi-movie narrative since he’s already openly talked about Argylle being the start of an expansive trilogy. Then again, Vaughn has often gone overboard in his plans for franchises spun off from his movies, as seen by the endless Kingsman multimedia cinematic universeand Kick-Ass reboot that never actually materialized. Still, whether or not audiences ever actually see more of Argylle, the cat’s officially out of the bag regarding the first plot details of this new Matthew Vaughn movie.
