ARGYLLE SUCKS

Okay, it doesn't totally suck; I just really wanted to use that headline.

Opening in theaters this weekend:

Argylle--For about the first half or so of this action comedy, our heroine Elly is pulled through chases and shootouts, squealing in girlish fright. Played by Bryce Dallas Howard, Elly is an author of popular spy thrillers featuring the flawlessly suave secret agent man Argylle, represented in her mind's eye by Henry Cavill.

One day on an Amtrak train she's accosted by Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a scruffy obnoxious guy who tells her that she's in grave danger, as her books are proving prophetic in real-world counterintelligence. Within seconds Aidan is defending her, and her put-upon Scottish Fold cat Alfie, from countless assassins in extended, cartoony hand-to-hand and gun combat, all the while dispensing reassurance and encouragement, and she's swept off into a globetrotting adventure.

You may recall that this was the central gag in the lame 2010 comedy Night and Day, with Cameron Diaz as the civilian and Tom Cruise as the hypercompetent and comically supportive secret agent man. Rockwell's woebegone manner is funnier and more agreeable than that of Cruise, but even so too much of this film feels derivative of previous spy parodies, both recent and vintage, from 2022's Bullet Train to the Mission: Impossible and Bourne flicks, and beyond. As in many of those films, the preposterously over-choreographed action scenes carry no real emotional weight, and I found the first part of the movie pretty tedious.

It started to grow on me after a while, though. The stars help; I've long been inclined to approve of Howard, with her lush pin-up beauty and her sweetness, and as Elly delves deeper into the case and gains more confidence, Howard is able to overcome the condescending hysterical woman stereotype she's forced to play along with early on. And she and the self-assured sad sack Rockwell play off each other nicely and without phony bickering.

The supporting cast is also top-notch; director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter Jason Fuchs would have to work hard to prevent Bryan Cranston, as the fed-up evil kingpin, or Samuel L. Jackson as another spy boss, or the great Catherine O'Hara, pestering Elly to spend a weekend with Mom, from giving the audience any amusement. Along with Cavill's Argylle, the movie offers such overtly glamorous types as Jon Cena and Dua Lipa and Sofia Boutella and Ariana DeBose and Richard E. Grant, and they add another layer of drollery.

But just about the time I was loosening up and starting to think that Argylle was pretty good after all, it overplays its hand in the way of so many contemporary action blockbusters, shoveling one exhaustingly explosive finale after another at us. At two hours and twenty minutes it's at least thirty minutes too long. After a while you might start wondering if the movie has ended, and you're already a half-hour into Argylle 2.

TO BE, OR NUT TO BE

Opening this weekend:

The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature—It may be that Our Commander in Chief raised the profile of this movie a bit when, with the presidential gravitas we’ve come to expect from him, he reportedly referred to his fired FBI Director as a “nut job.” Not much less than executive action could have kept this sequel to 2014’s animated feature The Nut Job, a particularly drab and unrewarding kidflick, from flying under the radar. 

The original, which was based, in turn, on a much better 2005 cartoon short from Canada called Surly Squirrel, was about squirrels and other fuzzy little creatures from a city park raiding the nut shop across the street in the manner of a noir heist movie. It was promising idea, wrecked by the inclusion of a bunch of obligatory kid-movie elements, like an underdog hero and a love interest, which negated the caper-picture atmosphere.

The sequel finds alpha squirrel Surly (voiced, again, by Will Arnett) and his pals living easy on the hoard in the basement of the now closed and abandoned nut shop. When this lifetime supply is destroyed, the gang is forced to return to the hard but character-building work of foraging in the park, as Surly’s love interest squirrel (Katherine Heigl) had been urging all along. But when a greedy Mayor (Bobby Moynihan) decides to turn the park into a shoddy but profitable amusement park, the creatures band together to mount a resistance. 

I’m not suggesting anyone should rush straight to the multiplexes to see Nut Job 2, but for whatever it may be worth, it’s funnier than the original. It has some visual richness—there are scenes which recall everything from Caddyshack to Bill Peet’s wonderful children’s book Farewell to Shady Glade—and some truly crazy old-school cartoon slapstick.

The most memorable character from the first film, a pug voiced by Maya Rudolph, is back again, this time with a love interest (Bobby Cannavale). But the best new element is Mr. Feng, a feral white mouse voiced by Jackie Chan who leads a crack army of martial-artist mice. Toward the end, this rodent collective commandeers a HAZMAT suit, and brings it to wobbly life, something like the mice masquerading as a ghost that torment Sylvester in the classic 1954 Warner Brothers cartoon Claws for Alarm.

Stuff like this bumps Nut Job 2 up a few notches over its predecessor. If you find yourself at a matinee of it with your kid, you may get a few more chuckles than you expected.

Still in theaters:

Atomic Blonde--There's some enjoyment, certainly, in watching the stunning 41-year-old Charlize Theron beat the snot out of skeevy-looking guys. And you can get your fill of this pleasure from this espionage thriller, set in Berlin in 1989, against the backdrop of The Wall coming down. There are lots of fight scenes, intricately choreographed, superbly shot, and performed with a percussive, grunting-and-groaning violence by Theron and the heavies assaulting her, and these sequences go on for a long, long time. 

They often feel like fights in a stage play, with the actors "selling" their highly telegraphed moves with loud vocalizations. The combatants slow down as the fights progress and they get increasingly tired and injured. They're left bloody and dirty and scarred, and our heroine is forced to take ice baths to revive herself afterwards.

This is not to say, of course, that the action in this film is really much more plausible than that in any Bond or Jackie Chan movie. It's just stylized in a different way, and after a while the brutality of it becomes funny--you wonder what makes these people so doggedly determined to kill each other, what could possibly inspire such loyalty and commitment in the face of such savage punishment. 

But it is fun to watch. Many of the film's brawls and stalkings are ingeniously edited to '80s techno-pop hits, Bowie and Falco and Nena and the like, and as with the '70s stuff in the Guardians of the Galaxy flicks, it's a terrific, nostalgic playlist.

Theron plays Lorraine, sent by MI6 to investigate the murder of a British spy just as the East German government is unraveling, and to recover the McGuffin he was chasing, some sort of list that could restart the Cold War. This allows Theron to be spectacularly showcased, both in terms of her physical abandon and her nicotine and Stoli-charged ‘80s glamour. But there’s nothing especially distinctive about Lorraine as a character, and while I didn’t particularly notice any deficiencies in her British accent, the person with whom I saw the film did. 

The star, the fights and the music have to hold us through a story that's both complicated and somehow uninvolving. Lorraine's bosses tell her to trust no one, including Their Man in Berlin (James McAvoy). Other shady sorts include Sofia Boutella as a neophyte French operative, John Goodman as a CIA man, Til Schweiger as a contact in a watch shop, Eddie Marsan as the Soviet asset they're trying to smuggle into West Berlin, and Toby Jones and James Faulkner as the British Intelligence honchos.

That cast is a game and capable bunch, clearly, but the script, adapted from a graphic novel, doesn't release their full potential. And the director, stunt unit specialist David Leitch, doesn't find a way to unwind the plot twists coherently. The movie feels overlong to no notable benefit; stretches of it are entertaining, but it's ultimately unsatisfying.

SHE'S WITH THE BANDAGE

Opening this week:

The Mummy—After the usual Universal logo at the start of this movie, we're shown a second, spooky logo informing us that it's part of the "Dark Universe." This seems to be the studio's attempt to start its own franchise-crossing brand in the style of DC or Marvel, drawing on its peerless stable of iconic monsters.

This is fair enough, considering that, with its multi-monster free-for-alls of the '40s like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Dracula, Universal was overlapping its properties before anyone else. There are fun possibilities in the "Dark Universe" notion, but it's off to an inauspicious start with this first salvo, no less than the fourth film to go by the title The Mummy.

While last week's big opening involved a female superhero, this week's has a female monster, Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), a lethal Egyptian princess who made a deal with Set for power, committed a bunch of murders, and got mummified and buried alive, far from Egypt, for her trouble. Centuries later, two fortune hunters (Tom Cruise and Jake Johnson) from the U.S. military and an English archaeologist (Annabelle Wallis) find her tomb in Iraq, and, like any self-respecting cultural imperialists, promptly schlep her sarcophagus to England. The desiccated deadly damsel is of course awakened, and starts causing trouble, with the idea of making Cruise her Set-possesed consort.

This movie, directed by Alex Kurtzman, starts out really badly. Even setting aside how unsavory it feels to try to make raffish buddy-picture heroes out of archaeological profiteers in present-day Iraq, the attempt to create a jocular rapport between Cruise and Johnson falls embarrassingly flat on its own terms. And the attempt to generate a roguish romantic tension between Cruise and Wallis plays no better. Hope and Crosby and Dorothy Lamour these people aren't; they don't even rise to the level of Dick Foran, Wallace Ford and Peggy Moran in The Mummy's Hand, from Universal in 1940.

I make these comparisons, by which Cruise et al suffer, not to be ungenerous but because almost everything in this expensive, elaborately-produced movie feels like a hyped-up, computer-enhanced version of something from a cheaper, less elaborate, better old movie. One minute you're reminded of Valerie Leon in Blood From the Mummy's Tomb, and the next of the crows from the Omen flicks, and then of the zombie shockers, and then of Renfield's rat army in Dracula, and then of Griffin Dunne's chatty putrefying ghost in An American Werewolf in London, and so on. But this effect doesn't make this Mummy a gripping repurposing of these tropes—it makes you want to go home and watch the movies of which it reminds you.

The Mummy gets a little more engaging, at least for a while, when it gets to England and Ahmanet starts reeling around sucking the life-force out of hapless victims, because it's more of a conventional monster picture. But pretty soon she and Cruise are detained in an underground complex run by a mysterious scientist (Russell Crowe), and more gratuitous plot twists are piled on. Presumably this is in service of establishing the "Dark Universe" mythos for future films, but mostly it just dilutes whatever momentum the story was starting to develop.

None of these complaints would amount to much, of course, if The Mummy could lay claim to any true scariness. But there isn't one scene in which I can recall being drawn into any authentic, atmospheric dread—as with Alien: Covenant a few weeks ago, everything's too virtual, to insubstantial, too lacking in tactility.

It should be said, though, that the closest the movie gets to any genuine chills is in the performance of  Sofia Boutella as the lithe, malignant, slyly smiling Ahmanet. Boutella was probably the best thing about last year's Star Trek: Beyond, and she's definitely the best thing about this movie.