Argylle (2024) (1 Viewer)

[Keith Cobby]

A lot of back projection shots of older films look more egregious to our higher resolution equipment than when shown theatrically. Also with bulky cameras it was more practical to finish off under studio conditions. But now with these films having huge budgets, the CGI should be seamless. I'm not planning to see this, but Jungle Cruise, Uncharted, Death on the Nile, recent Fast films, looked horrible with their cheap looking effects work.

 

[TravisR]

A lot of back projection shots of older films look more egregious to our higher resolution equipment than when shown theatrically. Also with bulky cameras it was more practical to finish off under studio conditions. But now with these films having huge budgets, the CGI should be seamless. I'm not planning to see this, but Jungle Cruise, Uncharted, Death on the Nile, recent Fast films, looked horrible with their cheap looking effects work.

I could notice a rear projection background going up and down like a yo-yo while the car stayed relatively motionless when I was a kid watching a movie on a small SDTV so there's no way that people didn't notice the same thing while viewing a 35mm print projected on a gigantic theater screen. Noticing something fake isn't a modern phenomenon, it's just that audiences accepted it as part of a movie.

As for huge budgets meaning that CG should be seamless, clearly that isn't the case or it would all be seamless.

 

[Keith Cobby]

Are bad greenscreen shots in modern movies all that more objectionable than bad rear projection shots in old movies? They both look like shit and take you out of the movie but I can't imagine anyone in 1948 complaining about the rear projection work in a movie.

Agree about 1948, but many will be complaining about the poor effects in this film.

 

[Jason_V]

I could notice a rear projection background going up and down like a yo-yo while the car stayed relatively motionless when I was a kid watching a movie on a small SDTV so there's no way that people didn't notice the same thing while viewing a 35mm print projected on a gigantic theater screen. Noticing something fake isn't a modern phenomenon, it's just that audiences accepted it as part of a movie.

I'd add to that: modern movies taking place in a moving vehicle and the driver stares at the passenger for five or ten seconds while actually driving. That takes me out of a movie every single time. I always wonder why no one figured this out in the edit.

 

[Tino]

I dunno. This looks like a lot of fun. I’ll check it out in IMAX.

 

[Malcolm R]

There seems to be no correlation between budget and FX quality. You can spend over $300 million and have lots of bad/fake-looking shots (Fast X) or spend $15 million and be nominated for an FX Oscar (Godzilla Minus One).

 

[Jake Lipson]

Stardust (which Vaughn directed on a $70 million budget back in 2007) looks great. I have used that movie many times to point out that you can make a good movie with big special effects on a reasonable budget. Vaughn used to know how to do that. I also think Stardust is by far the best thing Vaughn has ever made. It is an all-time favorite of mine.

I thought the trailer looked kind of fun when I first saw it, but I wasn't really ever counting the days until this movie comes out. The reviews thus far have not done much to convince me that I should go to it. I might wait for this one on Apple after all.

I have liked a lot of Vaughn's work, but Kingsman was released in 2015. It was supposed to be 2014 at one point but kept getting pushed back. So between those films and now this one, he's basically been making silly spy action comedies for a decade now. If that's what he likes to do, that's fine. But they're starting to feel a little same-y. This movie doesn't seem like it would be out of place in the Kingsman world even though it does not appear to be connected to that. Stardust, Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class and Kingsman all feel distinct from each other even though Vaughn made all of them. Now, he seems to be in the same lane all the time.

 

[Malcolm R]

It's the James Cameron method of film-making. Find one thing that interests you and do nothing else.

 

[Osato]

Ouch…

Argylle generates bad reviews

Argylle, the new spy movie from director Matthew Vaughn, isn’t getting much love from film reviewers. It opened with a 39% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website, which collects reviews. As of…

hmssweblog.wordpress.com

 

[Alan Tully]

I'd add to that: modern movies taking place in a moving vehicle and the driver stares at the passenger for five or ten seconds while actually driving. That takes me out of a movie every single time. I always wonder why no one figured this out in the edit.

Oh yes, that really bugs me, if people drove like that there’d be carnage on the roads. When you’re driving you don’t take your eyes off the road for a second, & when talking to a passenger, you don’t look at them (you might incline your head slightly to get them in your peripheral vision, but still looking ahead). It happens all the time now & the director is completely to blame for it.
….I can’t say that the movie interests me at all, apart from wondering about the vast budget (& being perplexed about Apple’s business model re movies).

 

[jayembee]

I react the same way, every time. Still, I'm perfectly happy to write that off as artistic license.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Saw it on AMC Imax with their upgraded laser projection, and it looks pretty colorful and sharp.

The movie had some patented Vaughn humor and laughs, but it is a bit too long, maybe chop out 15-20 minutes and it would have flowed better.

 

[AlexF]

Saw this today, really enjoyed it. Very colourful, some good clever humour, especially in the train fight scene.

Sam Rockwell definitely stole the show in this one and had me hanging off his every word.

I also really loved just how awful Henry Cavill's hair was.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

"Argylle" reeks of parody... ish.

As I watched, I couldn't figure out if it intended to spoof big dumb action movies or if it simply was a big dumb action movie.


I loved the first "Kingsmen" and the 2nd was good too. And I really liked Vaughn's X-Men.


But now he seems to just be spinning his wheels. Style choices and visual concepts that thrilled 10 years ago now seem redundant and stale.


"Argylle" ends up as a collection of plot twists in search of an actual movie.

And the effects were terrible - so bad that I continually wondered if that was part of the "joke". A spoof of big dumb action movies with big dumb effects.

 

[Malcolm R]

I read (clip below) that Vaughn self-financed this film and the Kingsmen films and has been selling distribution rights to the studio, but that they're not really studio productions. Might explain some of the second-tier technical details if he's doing most things himself and may not have access to the top-tier talent in FX and such that work with the major studios.

In regards to Universal’s skin on Argylle, I hear it’s a distribution deal in the sense that they get around an 8% fee of the box office. Chances are, Uni isn’t going to collect that. I hear Universal is on the hook for 50% of this $80M marketing campaign (which has Vaughn’s heavy fingerprints on its creative), and that the studio collects back what it’s owed in marketing from the box office before it collects a distribution fee. Why did Universal get involved with Argylle? I understand that Uni Boss Donna Langley wanted to get into future business with Vaughn. All these Apple distribution deals work differently. In certain cases, some studios get a guaranteed distribution fee, even if the movie buckles at the B.O.

With Argylle, Vaughn arguably clocks the lowest CinemaScore of his career to date. By the way, financially, he’s alright: His Marv-financed Argylle, and then sold it to Apple for $200M. The filmmaker self-finances and then sells his movies, which has been his practice going back to The Kingsman movies at 20th Century Fox, that studio acquiring the first two films at $100M+ apiece. (deadline.com)

So he sold it for $200 million to Apple, but presumably that includes a nice profit margin and the actual budget spent on production was less than that.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I saw it and it barely felt like a movie. A collection of overlong scenes and action sequences strung together without the benefit of characterization or meaningful engagement. I didn’t have an issue with any of the effects but it just didn’t give me a reason to be invested in anything that happened onscreen.

I think this desperately needed to be a fast paced, 90ish minute film that leaned in more on the “fun” elements. The earlier portions about the author writing about a world she didn’t live in reminded me a bit of the Sandra Bullock film “Lost City,” but Lost City knew not to take itself too seriously.

It feels like Matthew Vaughn keeps wanting to make a 60s James Bond film, but what he misses in my view and what those films did so well is to give the audience a sense of what the stakes are and why the actions Bond takes are important. Here, ostensibly, the goal is to flush out a traitor in the intelligence service, but I don’t feel they did a good job of connecting the dots about why that should be important to me, and the weight that is supposed to carry seemed to get lighter and more detached from reality as the film piled on twist after twist.

Compare that to something like Thunderball - Bond sorta stumbles on what could be a lead worth following while taking personal time at a medical clinic, and it leads to him having a heads up that a nuclear warhead gone missing wasn’t an accident as was believed by his superiors. There’s fun and games and sex but it’s always clear that recovering stolen warheads is the goal. Even Goldfinger, which is incredibly fun while being wildly ludicrous, has a set of unfolding stakes that makes sense within the context of the film - someone is trying to horde the world’s gold supply to manipulate financial markets and use that leverage to gain control over world governments. Each scene builds upon the last and pushes towards an endpoint that makes sense within the world of the film.

As I’m watching Argylle, by comparison, I realize that I have little understanding of why anything anyone is doing matters. So what if there’s a mole in a spy agency? What does it matter? For me the film didn’t really set that up, which left me looking at pretty people and photography but without a reason to care. At 90 minutes, sure, but at 2 1/2 hours, enough already.

 

[EricSchulz]

I’ve seen the preview three times in the past month or so. I couldn’t wait for THAT to end…I can’t imagine it stretched out to 2 1/2 hours.

 

[Jason_V]

I was on board until

Spoiler: Spoiler

the oil skating scene. I mentally checked out at that point and couldn't care less about anything afterward. It's terribly fake and, with all the skating, you'd think Elly would be covered in oil. But nope. Then there's the hallway smoke battle scene...and then I've had enough.

For what it's worth, my husband loved it. But then again, he wasn't 100% sober, so, ya know. That might be the best way to watch it going forward...

 

[Jake Lipson]

Reading this thread (and the synopsis on Wikipedia) made me glad I decided not to pay to see this in theaters after all. But it also makes me sad because I really have enjoyed several of Vaughn's other movies. So I should want to see this, except I don't.

I will be interested to see where Vaughn's career goes from here. I certainly wish him the best. But what comes after a big misfire like this? I know Apple is a big tech company and they make tons of money off of tons of things that aren't movies. I'm typing this message right now on an Apple product. But I still don't think it is very likely that they would be willing to acquire another film in this franchise from Vaughn for $200 million again considering the results this one has put up so far.

 

[Malcolm R]

If it eventually pulls in big streaming numbers on AppleTV, they may think it's worth it.

Some BO prognosticators keep trying to make the point that we cannot evaluate theatrical releases backed by streamers the same as studio releases since theatrical is not really their main interest. The hope is that the theatrical release will lend additional prestige to the title when it arrives on streaming even if it's not a box office hit, moreso than something that goes direct to streaming and has that old "direct to video" perception of yesteryear.