I guess this is a good spot to give some brief thoughts on Matthew Vaughn’s “Argylle,” which I caught up with on Wednesday night. This will be short and sweet: it’s LONG, loud, incoherent and boring. Was that enough for you?
It’s honestly pure torture. A chaotic 140 minute mess of a movie. The big loser here is not Apple, but Vaughn. The fact that he could actually direct such a bad movie should be cause for major concern in relation to all of his other future projects.
I love this line from Katie Walsh’s L.A. Times review. It perfectly encapsulated my thoughts —
Argylle has bone-deep structural issues on a fundamental level, but it is also a failure of directorial execution from top to bottom, resulting in what has to be one of the most expensive worst movies ever made. It’s honestly fascinating — something that should be studied in a lab.
It’s not just critics who hate it either — it has a 35% on Rotten Tomatoes. “Argylle” just garnered a C+ on CinemaScore, which is a terrible grade considering most tentpoles films, at the very least, get a B, but not “Argylle,” audiences aren’t giving it a pass. On IMDb it also has a weak 6.0 score out of 5k votes.
Even worse, THR has a headline today that reads “Apple’s Big-Budget ‘Argylle’ Bombing.” Ouch. And it is bombing. It won’t be making more than $15-$16 million this weekend, and, given those low audience scores, it sure as hell won’t have any legs in the coming weeks.
We also still have no idea what Argylle’s budget was. THR claims it cost a “reported $200 million to make before marketing,” but Vaughn has denied that figure. If I had to bet, given what I saw on-screen, the CGI and effects, it must have cost at least $80-$90 million, if not more.
This is a real mess for not just Apple, but also Vaughn, and it now makes total sense why Apple chose to dump it during the dog days of February. Right now, there really is no other theatrical competition for “Argylle”, and that’s probably the only good news the film has going for it.