Thanks to the saga dedicated to Agent Argylle, Elly Conway is one of the most successful writers around, an heir to John le Carré who tells with admirable skill about secret service agents with a license to kill. Until one day she, from being the creator of spy stories, becomes the unaware and recalcitrant protagonist, once dragged into the action by Aidan Wilde, an authentic spy at the antipodes of the idealized and fictitious Argylle. Once the initial panic has passed, Elly will understand that she is in serious danger and that Wilde is her only way of saving herself.

Introduced by a captivating and highly glamorous trailer, Matthew Vaughn’s spy comedy (he directed the Kingsman saga) proves to live up to expectations for about an hour, before gradually transforming into an action wildest kitsch.

Parody mixes with blockbuster ambitions, exploiting the excuse of self-irony to indulge in crude and camp computer graphics effects. Argylle does not skimp on violence, although it is suggested rather than shown, with bullets lavished in quantity but bloodshed to a minimum, in line with current Disney trends. Undecided about which identity to assume, Vaughn’s film borders on psychoanalytic drama and even caresses the metaphor on the inevitability of hiding one’s profile behind an avatar in the post-truth era.

For a moment it almost seems like we can believe that Jason Fuchs’ screenplay takes the arduous path of allegory, supported by the use of “Now and Then”, an unreleased song by the Beatles published in 2023 and reconstructed thanks to artificial intelligence. For two characters in the film – it would be a spoiler to reveal which ones – it even becomes “our song”, thus definitively dissociating the diegetic plane from the extra-diegetic one.

In our reality no one has listened to the song until today; in Argylle’s, however, hidden among the Chinese boxes of the metatext, “Now and Then” is even the Cupid of a future relationship. A fascinating drift on post-truth and continuous counterfeiting which, in line with the characters’ insistent use of avatars, reinforces Fuchs’ concept of our inexorably dissociated present.