As I write this, it’s the day of Super Bowl 58, pitting the Kansas City Chiefs against the San Francisco 49ers. One of the biggest stories leading up to the game is Taylor Swift and her romantic involvement with KC tight end Travis Kielce. This has caused… just so much media coverage and consternation and fan swooning. It’s too much. For an event that’s already an absurd annual media circus.

I don’t mind Taylor Swift, but she’s hardly one of my favorite female musicians of all time. But my most enjoyed discourse around Swift’s lover making it to the Superbowl is definitely the cries that it was all fixed to get her here.

You really only can believe that if you don’t actually, you know, WATCH football. If you did, you would realize the Kansas City Chiefs have been one of the best teams in the league for the last half dozen years or so. And in that time frame, they have already appeared in three other Superbowls with Taylor not factoring in at all.

But they make it again THIS year, and suddenly it’s all fixed.

Let’s get one thing straight: only one Superbowl was ever rigged, and that was Superbowl 40. Accursed referees!

Anyway, last night while awaiting today’s The Big Game, I headed out for a whole night at the movies wherein I saw Lisa Frankenstein and Argylle. Having already written on the former, we are here today to cover the latter.

Argylle is an action-comedy-spy thriller from Matthew Vaughn, the genius behind Kick-Ass, the Kingsman series, and X-Men First Class. It has a huge cast of A-list and A-list-adjacent talent, and it spins the tale of Elly Conway, an author of the Argylle series of spy novels. She finds herself caught up in the actual world of espionage when it turns out that what she has written in her works frequently comes true. And the cliffhanger ending of her fifth book has sent the real world’s spy organizations into a tizzy.

She is recruited by super-spy Aiden to fend off the villainous machinations of The Division, a vaguely evil agency bent on some nebulous and not-wholly-explained evil deeds. Through a slew of plot twists and big reveals–and seriously: there are a lot of them–Elly has to help Aiden stop world-changing information from falling into The Division’s hands.

But it’s okay, because if the bad guys win, I’m sure the NFL and Taylor Swift arranged for that to happen, too. Right, conspiracy nuts?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+A lot of the promotion around the movie was the slogan “Don’t Let The Cat Out Of The Bag” in regards to the big reveals (and the fact that it co-stars a cat), and I will say that the twists and turns the story takes are a lot of fun. And relatively hard to see coming. Or I’m just a fool. Either is highly likely.

Obviously I don’t want to get into any noteworthy spoilers here, but there are some pretty big swerves in this one, and they make the flick fun to follow. It’s arguable that the story takes too many twists, throwing some out just for the sake of having them (and we’ll get to the most egregious of them shortly), but by and large, I liked the reveals here. They were quite clever.

+The cast For Argylle is phenomenal. Admittedly, some members of it like John Cena aren’t handed nearly as much to do as others given their part in the plot, but it’s hard to argue with a roster that includes Catherine O’Hara, Bryan Cranston, Sam Rockwell, Samuel L. Jackson, Henry Cavill, and more. Bryce Dallas Howard shines as the lead, too.

It’s fair to argue that not every cast member is given the best material of their career to work with, but a line-up like this can cover up a lot of flaws.

-One entire Down rests on details I can’t possibly give away without getting into spoiler territory, and I don’t love the idea of doing that. I’ll talk around it as much as I can.

After several interesting plot twists and turns in the first two acts, there are a few fairly major ones still to come in the third. The last of which is entirely predictable and easily foreseen, and I can forgive that. But the other one is abject nonsense that actually completely undermines information the movie already gave out. It’s a plot twist that almost undoes an earlier reveal… or at least makes that reveal irrelevant.

It’s hard to bitch too much about it without revealing it, but suffice to say it makes an earlier reveal make no sense whatsoever, and I have no idea how it got past even one layer of story editing.

-Matthew Vaughn has been well regarded in terms of his bombastic and bonkers action set-pieces from his previous work on Kingsman and Kick-Ass, so it was reasonable to assume we would see more of that here. The trailer even teased it to a small degree when we saw a glimpse of two figures firing guns amidst a cloud of colorful smoke. Based on that, it seemed like we were in for the typical ride!

Unfortunately, Argylle has a couple big action beats in the third act, but none of them work. The alluded to scene with the colorful smoke is cheesy and overproduced. It’s only topped in being ineffectual by a subsequent scene featuring a character ice-skating across an oil slick, which is again overproduced and has pretty awful visual effects.

There are other action moments across the film, but those two are clearly designed as the big, extravagant Matthew Vaughn Action Set Pieces, and neither of them are particularly good. It makes you wonder what happened to the guy who used to excel at these parts of action blockbusters.

OVERALL

Argylle ends up being a movie with a strong enough first two acts that is then horribly undone by its third. From awful effects to terrible action scenes to the plot going full nonsense, everything just unravels late on this one. It’s as shame when I was really enjoying the ride for the first hour-plus. It ends up feeling more like a terribly missed dismount after a good routine.