[COLUMN] Argylle Works Best as Piece of IP Performance Art | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle is a bloated and indulgent mess of a movie. It’s also very dumb. However, it is at least dumb in an interesting way. If nothing else, it confirms Vaughn as a fascinating filmmaker in the landscape of modern franchise cinema. To put it simply, Matthew Vaughn is an IP troll.

Hollywood has spent over a decade in “an IP frenzy”, which has even extended to prestige television. It is hard for filmmakers to convince studios to invest in big budget properties not tied to existing brands. “The way to cut through the noise is hitching yourself onto something customers have some exposure to already,” explained producer Tripp Vinson. “If you’re going to work in the studio system, you better have a really big IP behind you.”

Modern Hollywood is obsessed with intellectual property. Of course, sequels have always been a fact of life and there are plenty of examples of proto-shared-universes in Hollywood history, most obviously the Universal monster movies. At the same time, it seems fair to concede that trends have certainly accelerated to the point that the people responsible for the Rubik’s Cube are promising (or threatening) “a wonderful and complex Rubik’s universe.”

Audiences have come to expect that a given blockbuster is no longer self-contained. It’s rarely even just a launching pad for a sequel. Most modern big tentpole films are designed to support spin-offs and crossovers, creating a tangled web of interlocked iconography. These touches occasionally veer into self-parody. In the post-credits scene for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) takes a job interview with Burke (Michael Kelly), who offers him a card reading "G.I. Joe."

Vaughn is a director who broke out in the early days of this modern IP craze. His first film was Layer Cake, a charming British gangster film that was part of the wave that Guy Ritchie had started with Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. He followed it up with Stardust, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel. He then hopped over into superhero intellectual property, adapting Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass followed by the X-Men prequel/reboot First Class.

In the wake of First Class, Vaughn went to work launching his own franchise. Between 2014 and 2021, he directed three films: Kingsman: The Secret Service, the sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and the prequel The King’s Man. While these were ostensibly adaptations of a comic written by Mark Millar and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, they were really an excuse for Vaughn to embrace his own affection for classic British spy movies, notably the James Bond movies starring Roger Moore.

Indeed, what’s interesting about that five-film run is that each of those films has an interesting relationship to the Hollywood IP machine. First Class is the only one of the five to be part of a larger studio-controlled shared universe, and even that is a continuity reset of the larger franchise that mostly does its own thing. Kick-Ass is based on a comic book, albeit with the rougher edges sanded down, but that comic book is itself effectively Spider-Man with the serial numbers filed off.

Vaughn’s movies often feel like an excuse for the director to do whatever he wants to do, under the umbrella of an existing piece of intellectual property. In particular, his two most recent films – The King’s Man and Argylle – self-consciously and aggressively play with the internal and external logic of modern franchise filmmaking. These are weird and chaotic movies that don’t entirely work on their own terms, but make a lot more sense when considered as weird parodies of the form.

The King’s Man is a movie set in the lead-up to and during the First World War. This was a horrific conflict. It led to around 16.5 million deaths. This is very solemn subject matter, particularly in Great Britain, where Remembrance Day originated as a way to mourn the generation lost to the conflict. However, The King’s Man eschews the earnestness of something like All Quiet on the Western Front, instead treating the First World War as blockbuster fodder; slow motion, soaring music, epic stunts.

Vaughn filters the real-life history of the conflict through the cinematic language of the modern franchise blockbuster. Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) is no longer a sinister manipulator, but a full-blown unkillable super villain who stages cool dance fights and gets his own snazzy promotional music video. It is one step removed from reimagining the conflict as a rap battle, with Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl) stepping forward once Rasputin is vanquished, because there’s always another villain.

However, it is the post-credits scene that gives the game away. Post-credits scenes are not new, but they are part of the conventions of modern blockbusters. The Marvel Cinematic Universe introduced Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the glue that held the first few years of shared continuity together, in a post-credits scene in Iron Man. These scenes set up sequels and spin-offs, creating a sense in which individual movies flow into and out of one another.

If The King’s Man presents the First World War as a piece of existing intellectual property to be mined for blockbuster spectacle, it needs to tease the sequel. In the post-credits scene, the villainous mastermind Erik Jan Hanussen (Daniel Brühl) introduced Lenin to their organization’s most promising new recruit: Adolf Hitler (David Kross). It is one of the most absurd pieces of blockbuster filmmaking ever made, with Hitler emerging from the shadows and getting a zoom on dropping his own name.

Anybody who has been to a cinema over the past fifteen years will recognize what Vaughn is doing. This closing “cameo” is stock-and-trade for modern franchise films. There are countless examples of characters teased in this fashion: Shadow in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Starfox (Harry Styles) in Eternals, Clea (Charlize Theron) in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Hercules (Brett Goldstein) in Thor: Love and Thunder, to name a few. Apparently, Vaughn really is working on a sequel.

There is something inherently provocative in this, whether intentionally or accidentally. The King’s Man takes real-life figures and tragedies, and then feeds them through the gears of modern franchise filmmaking. The results are uncanny and unsettling. These choices ask the audience to consider the way in which these stories are told, and what that has done to the viewer’s relationship to things that should exist outside that framework?

After all, much has been written about how contemporary politics is filtered through the lens of entertainment – whether sports or reality television. There are ongoing wars being fought over how history is presented and taught, with real events (and figures) often distorted to conform to comfortable and reassuring narratives. Vaughn plays with that inherent absurdity, the idea that everything is a particular kind of spectacle.

Argylle does something vaguely similar. It tells the story of spy novelist Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), author of a series built around the fictitious spy Aubrey Argylle (Henry Cavill). However, an encounter with real-life secret agent Adrian (Sam Rockwell) reveals that Elly has unknowingly been writing about real events. Desperate to recover vital information before his enemy can get ahold of it, Adrian asks Elly to write the last chapter before it happens.

Argylle is self-aware. It is full of knowing winks and nods, particularly in its casting. Cavill gets to play a suave secret agent, years after being turned down for the part of James Bond. Adrian’s dancing isn’t just a way to show off Rockwell’s dancing skills, it’s a key plot point. Bryan Cranston plays a family man with an entire secret life as head of a criminal organization, an allusion to Breaking Bad. At one point, Elly kicks off her heels before running, a reference to Howard’s role in Jurassic World.

However, there is a larger game being played. In pre-publicity, Vaughn claimed that Argylle was based on the fourth book in an ongoing spy franchise, written by a real-life Elly Conway. There are plans for two sequels, the first of which will be an adaptation of “book one.” Incidentally, only one Argylle book has been published to date, with the film supposedly based off an outline for the fourth installment. It’s all very convoluted, but that’s how the intellectual property train rolls. It’s possible to end up with a Sony Pictures Spider-Man universe without a Spider-Man.

It’s also worth acknowledging that this is all nonsense. Argylle is not based on a book, because there is no Elly Conway. On the internet, there was fervent speculation that Elly Conway was really Taylor Swift, and that the hardest-working woman in show business had somehow churned out a spy franchise while working on The Eras Tour. In reality, per an investigation by Sophia Nguyen, the Argylle book was ghostwritten by Tammy Cohen.

Of course, there are plenty of movies that have been adapted into books. The movie novelization is a staple of the pop culture landscape. There are also many books that have been defictionalized, such as Look Out for the Little Guy, Scott Lang’s (Paul Rudd) memoir from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. However, there is something different about Argylle, a movie that has playfully retrofitted an intellectual property around itself. It claims to be based on a book that it itself inspired.

It's an intellectual property ouroboros, a franchise eating its own tail. It’s also very stupid. The film includes a post-credits teaser revealing the “real” Aubrey Argylle was a member of the Kingsman, positioning Argylle as part of a larger “spy universe.” As such Vaughn has created two separate franchises that are affectionate pastiches of the Roger Moore James Bond movies. It is fundamentally ridiculous, but then modern filmmaking is ridiculous.

At a certain point in this modern hypermediated world, Poe’s Law inevitably sets in. The parody of a thing becomes indistinguishable from the thing itself. At what point does Vaughn’s parodic invocation of the trappings of modern soulless intellectual property driven franchise filmmaking just become an example of modern soulless intellectual property driven franchise filmmaking? If Argylle doesn’t cross that line, it comes perilously close.

Argylle doesn’t really work as a film. However, it is interesting as a weird piece of pop performance art. As with so much of Vaughn’s recent filmography, it’s a film that asks the audience to look at the state of the larger industry around it and revel in the absurdity.