Matthew Vaughn, the mastermind of a string of sadistically inventive action movies including Kick-Ass and the Kingsman series, wants to keep things a little lighter with his new spy romp, Argylle. “What the movie came out of, really, was watching Romancing the Stone with my daughters,” he told Polygon during a brief interview in a London hotel after a screening of the movie. Vaughn whiled away the 2020 COVID lockdown by showing films to his wife and teenage daughters, and the 1984 romantic adventure romp starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner “played like gangbusters,” he said. “And they said, ‘Well, you should make a movie like this, please, for us.’”

He has and he hasn’t. There are some obvious similarities in the premise: Romancing the Stone is about a romance novelist who gets sucked into a perilous, post-Raiders of the Lost Ark smuggling plot in the wilds of Colombia that could come straight from the pages of one of her own books. (2022’s The Lost City follows a similar plot, in another clear homage to Romancing the Stone.) Argylle, meanwhile, introduces lonely author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who writes rip-roaring spy thrillers in the James Bond mold, centered on dashing super-spy Aubrey Argylle (Henry Cavill). Struggling with the ending to her latest book, Elly is approached out of the blue by a real spy, Aidan (Sam Rockwell), who says she’s being hunted by a villainous syndicate called The Division because her books have predicted their plans with eerie accuracy, and they think she holds the key to their next move.

Vaughn, though, isn’t the type to take a setup like this purely at face value. The restless, postmodern ingenuity of his staging — particularly when it comes to action — drives him to create multiple levels to the story. First,........

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