Following the short, cat-centric teaser we got earlier this week, the first full-length trailer for Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle has dropped and promises a fun mix of action, espionage, comedy, and romance. If you’ve been following the film’s development, it’s been something of a conundrum since it was first announced a few years ago. Initially, the star-studded film was supposed to be an adaptation of the debut novel by a writer named Elly Conway. But soon, stories began to drop that Conway seemed not to exist, and indeed, the film no longer calls itself an adaptation.
It seems the whole Elly Conway angle was a meta prank, as the movie actually enters around an author named Elly Conway, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who’s the author of a series of novels about a secret agent named Argylle, who discovers that her books, somehow, are coming true.
The trailer suggests that Henry Cavill will play the 007-like agent Argylle in fantasy sequences lifted from Conway’s book (with John Cena as his partner and Dua Lipa as a femme fatale), while in the “real world” Conway is on the run with an agent (played by Sam Rockwell) whose trying to protect her from assassins sent by Bryan Cranston’s bad guy spymaster.
It all looks like a lot of fun, with it seeming like a mash-up of Kingsman-style action and perhaps a dab of Romancing the Stone, with Rockwell taking the real-world action hero mantle from Cavill in this one. If this is true and Rockwell is the primary action lead, I think that’s a really cool idea, as Vaughn’s done this sort of thing before. Don’t forget, he turned Colin Firth into an action star in Kingsman and did the same thing for Ralph Fiennes in the underrated prequel, The King’s Man.
Whatever the case, Howard, Rockwell and Cavill all seem cast to purr-fection, with the feline lead of the movie played by Vaughn’s own cat, Chip, who he shares with his wife, supermodel Claudia Schiffer. Well, the non CGI shots are his cat anyway.
Argylle hits theaters on February 2nd, and should debut on Apple TV sometime after (it’s an Apple Original Film).
Are you excited for Argylle? Let us know in the comments!