Ultimately, critics declared that “Argylle” is just… sort of a mess. Nicholas Barber at BBC.com specified some of the movie’s biggest messes, writing, “Everywhere you look, there are details that need to be added, plot holes that need to be filled, and jokes that need to be improved.” Nick Schager of The Daily Beast went after the movie’s attempt at humor and its star-studded cast, musing, “Its comic touch almost as heavy-handed as its slow-motion-drenched action is dull, it seems primarily designed to answer the question, “How many movie stars can one fiasco squander?”
At The Hollywood Reporter, Leslie Felperin pointed out the fact that “Argylle” barely even feels like a movie, but instead some sort of advertisement for a much more glamorous lifestyle. “It all starts to feel like one of those very expensive, very elaborate commercials for a pseudo-luxury product you don’t want to buy — a perfume perhaps, or some car,” she observed.
In the end, perhaps David Fear at Rolling Stone put it best; as Shakespeare said, brevity is the soul of wit. “‘Argylle’ is a bad movie,” he wrote. “A very, very bad movie.”
