★★★

Argylle opens bad. Seriously bad. Dead-on-arrival bad. Offered up is all-star – Dua Lipa! John Cena! Superman! – Grecian espionage but one woefully written, dismally acted and laden with risible special effects. But, wait! What’s this? A story within a story? Now we’re talking. There’s hope yet. Hold on to it. Sure enough, the film that follows improves not merely on the first five minutes but much of its director’s recent work. Matthew Vaughn’s, until now, unstoppable descent into distaste finally desists for Argylle, an overlong but mercifully entertaining romp.

Bryce Dallas Howard, erstwhile dinosaur-rights activist, is Elly Conway, the nervy and reclusive but immensely successful writer of the in-world Argylle novels. What we have just witnessed, it transpires, was the climax of book four. Henry Cavill is the Agent Argylle of Elly’s mind’s eye, a silky and debonair spy of clichéd yesteryear. Bond before Craig, as it were. A fifth Argylle is all but complete, wanting only for a revelatory final chapter. Except, what if Elly’s fiction was, in fact, fact? Or, at least, fact but a few name changes. Suddenly, one final chapter on the page could have very real world consequences.

Certainly, that’s what Sam Rockwell’s Aiden, an actual spy, believes. He’s not alone, either. Elly Conway is hot property for both sides of the goodie-baddie divide. In any case, Aiden gets to Elly first, intercepting her California bound train and whisking her off on an adventure well beyond her lakeside comfort zone. It is some small fortune that Elly finds herself able to bring her cat Alfie along for the ride. The Scottish Fold beauty, all lop-ears and wide eyes, is played by Chip, the actual cat owned by Claudia Schiffer, Vaughn’s wife. That the cat’s inclusion feels entirely contrived – Chip spends much of the film either in Elly’s backpack or replaced with CGI – can’t help but suggest a smidgeon of martial pressure. He is, nonetheless, completely adorable.

Felines aside, Argylle largely depends on wit and whack set pieces to maintain momentum. These being the musically inclined baddie bash-up scenes that so often pepper Vaughn’s oeuvre. It will come as little surprise to viewers that Argylle exists knowingly within the Kingsman universe. The song choices here might not smack of great creative inspiration but do inject valuable va va voom into the action. There’s a particularly thrilling ice-skating massacre late in the film, while sharp cutting enlivens an earlier apartment-set infraction. It’s all pleasingly bloodless and there’s not a human meat grinder in sight. Small victories.

Argylle’s highlights do, however, cast a shadow over all scenes between. As penned by Jason Fuchs, the script offers uneven fun times, not to mention a touch of the unrealistic, even within the film’s already outlandish narrative perimeters. There are moments here in which you fully expect characters to start pulling off their faces, a la Mission: Impossible. More troubling is the lack of emotional integrity. At one point, a character quite literally witnesses the murder of their own mother. Two scenes later, they’re more or less over it. Nobody will come to Argylle expecting high drama but being able to believe in a film’s characters feels like a minimum expectation.

That’s not to say the cast don’t entertain. Dallas Howard, in particular, revels in the delivery of a performance almost permanently on the verge of either total breakdown or self-revelation. Rockwell too seems to enjoy himself, while the likes of Samuel L. Jackson, Catherine O’Hara, Bryan Cranston and Ariana DeBose chew up smaller roles with unconcealed relish. There’s barely a B-lister in sight. No wonder Argylle cost so much. Fear not? Apple can take the hit.

T.S.