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If you've been to the movies at any point in the past few months, there's a pretty high chance the trailer for Matthew Vaughn's "Argylle" played before your movie. The advertising has been incessant (because the movie is funded by Apple TV+, a streamer with money to burn), in the hopes of creating an early year hit from a trailer that asks "Who is the real Agent Argylle?" But was the suspense worth it?

The best thing to be said about "Argylle" is that moviegoers will no longer be subjected to the trailer now that the movie is coming out. Vaughn's movie, written by Jason Fuchs, is so hideously conceived, from the page to the screen, that it makes enduring it for almost two-and-a-half hours a Herculean effort.

Bryce Dallas Howard stars as Elly Conway, the author of a popular spy series centered on an agent named Argylle (played by Henry Cavill when Elly is imaging her books in her mind). On a train ride to visit her mother (Catherine O'Hara), Elly meets Aidan (Sam Rockwell), who tells her he's a big fan of her books. He should know they're good because he works in espionage. Based on Aidan's shaggy appearance, she dismisses his claims, but suddenly people are approaching Elly and trying to attack her. Thankfully, Aidan found his way to her to fend all the bad guys on the train off.

Elly has no clue what's happening and why Aidan is whisking her around the world. He explains to her a shadowy operation known as the Divison, led by Director Ritter (Bryan Cranston), is looking for Elly because her books have a strange way of coming true. Despite Elly's many pleas of just being a writer, she is swept up in many near-death moments and cannot grasp that her novels have caused her to be such a target.

"Argylle" is one of those movies that is very pleased with how cheeky and clever it feels it's being, to an often off-putting degree. There are moments during the movie that feel like an actor could break character at any point and look directly into the camera with a "get a load of what we're doing" grin across their face. But, the fatal flaw of "Argylle" is it's never as clever as it wants to be. It's a movie that piles twists and revelations on top of each other like an ice cream sundae, but quickly melts under its own artificiality.

Even more curious is the movie's $200 million price tag, because how is that money being spent? The movie is visually unappealing in its computer-generated and green screen imagery. One of the biggest questions of modern filmmaking is how movies with large budgets often look worse than mid-budget or independent films.

"Argylle" wants you to be distracted by its globetrotting all-star cast (Jon Cena, Dua Lipa, Samuel L. Jackson, Ariana DeBose, and Richard E. Grant round out the cast), but everything that doesn't work in the movie is far more pronounced.