MOVIE NEWS In Argyle: The Super Spy, Henry Cavill plays the titular invincible hero, until it turns out that this time things are not quite as we are used to. Director Matthew Vaughn wants to show the genre in a new light.

“It’s partly my fault that spy movie clichés are so prevalent these days, since I’ve done several movies in this genre,” Vaughn told Vanity Fair. “Now it’s time for the big cutback, when I collect the well-known panels and turn it all upside down.”

All that can be known about Argylle: The Super Spy is that it starts out as a regular spy movie, in which Cavill, as it should be, e.g. dances overheated with erotica with Dua Lipá, who plays the woman of fate, but it turns out that it is all a figment of the imagination of a writer with an uncontrollable brain (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) , who is working on his latest novel. Then the game of imagination becomes reality and vice versa, because a mysterious spy organization attacks the writer, complaining that she can write in advance what they are secretly preparing for. How Vaughn manages to get out of this sophisticated game can only be seen in the film. There will be no shortage of twists and turns, Argylle: The Super Spy actually cost $200 million, just as much as the new Napoleon opus featuring large-scale battles.

Vaughn cites, among others, two great role models who inspired Argylle. One of them is the famous spy novelist Frederick Forsyth, whose books have sold 70 million copies and several of them have been filmed (Day of the Jackal, The Odessa Case). Forsyth was able to write such good spy novels because, as those familiar with the genre realized long ago, as he later admitted, he himself had been a spy for twenty years. As a war correspondent who reported to MI6, providing sensitive information that the British secret service would otherwise have had little access to, he was the first to inform the agencies of the hidden horrors of the Zambian civil war. In the later stages of the fruitful relationship, however, the spy service censored Forsyth’s novels in a special way: the writer sent the draft of the work being prepared to the “boys”, who checked whether the fiction was so close to reality that it would be harmful to the agency. According to Forsyth, over the years, they didn’t say much about what and how to write, they only asked for information from time to time to be on the safe side.
Another great favorite of Vaughn is the famous former James Bond, Roger Moore. “I love what he said about 007. The guy enters the salon, he immediately stands out because he is the most elegant, everyone knows his name, but also what he drinks and how. What kind of spy is that? Ready to laugh. Well, we wanted to crush those templates in Argylle: The Superspy.”

(Argylle – domestic release: February 1, 2024.)

Source: UIP Dunafilm