MATTHEW VAUGHN STACKS THE LAYERS of metafiction as high as he can in Argylle, a spy-action-comedy that’s a book within a movie within another series of movies, maybe. Possibly.
The plot is both simple and aggressively convoluted: Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the author of the series of Argylle spy novels, which she constructs in her mind’s eye with Henry Cavill playing the role of superspy Argylle and John Cena as his trusty partner, Wyatt. According to Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell)—who stops a series of assassins from taking Elly out while she travels by train to see her mother, Ruth (Catherine O’Hara)—Elly’s books have made her a target because they seem to be predicting the future. Everything she writes comes true. So she needs to keep writing to solve the mystery of a missing data file that will expose a secret agency that’s up to no good, etc.
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