.

Or Arggle as the young woman in my screening announced it. I guess she wasn’t around when Sockshop was big on the high street.

However you pronounce it, this is the latest film from director Matthew Vaughn. It felt for a while like Vaughn was trying to find his style as a film maker and then just as he appeared to have done so this has taken him off in another slightly different direction. His first movie, the smart British crime thriller Layer Cake, was exactly what you’d have expected from him following his success as Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch producing partner and it set Daniel Craig well on the road to Bond. Then came Stardust that was a wry but sweet fairytale story about true love and good over evil, and which remains one of the best family films of the last twenty years. Following shortly after was the brilliant Kick Ass which prominently had a child in it but was definitely not a kids movie. The inevitable sojourn into standard Hollywood blockbusters came next with X-Men: First Class, before his three Kingsman films which is where it seemed he’d found his groove. These uber violence and occasionally inappropriately smutty spy spoofs brought together the comic book elements he toyed with, in quite revolutionary fashion in Kick Ass, with a distinctly adult sensibility in a cartoonish world. He definitely seemed to have settled on his thing and it was a broadly successful.

Now with Arggle he has apparently lost some focus and sadly the movie is a bit of a mess, a vibrant one for sure but untidy and sloppy nonetheless. There was a discussion around whether Vaughn’s Kingsman and Kick Ass films needed to be as violent as they were (Kick Ass 2 is produced by him but nothing more) but based on this the answer is yes. This shares those movies OTT action approaches but without the same level of blood, stabbing and exploding heads it just comes across as a poor Spy Kids rip off; badly lacking any edge. I don’t necessarily think this is meant to be a family movie as it retains a bit of a dark heart but it certainly feels like one, only with none of the sophistication and tight storytelling shown in Stardust, that was suitable for a similarly wide audience. It’s like Vaughn has forgotten what he knew back then, blinded by all the bright colours he has put in his films of late.

This movie stays in the area of espionage then with fictional author Ely Conway getting caught up in an adventure reflective of the secret agent world she writes about. It is not unlike Lost City and Romancing the Stone in this respect but in its tone it feels more like a live action episode of Kim Possible. Henry Cavill plays Conway’s super spy in scenes imagined by the writer in the film and, with this coming after The Man From UNCLE and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, it’s like the actor is consciously using his filmography to audition for James Bond. I’m not sure it’s helping his chances but maybe he saw what working for Vaughn did for the last guy to get the part and he’s thinking this will be the one to clinch it. Sam Rockwell is Cavill’s counterpart in ‘reality’ and both actors are good enough in the roles as written but I struggled with the apparently requisite bad hair (I lost it when Rockwell randomly got the blonde tips).

The film is being sold on its twists but this may not have been wise either. Having highlighted that the plot would be veering off in different directions, none of the reveals were actually that surprising. Much has been made of the featured appearance of Vaughn and wife Claudia Schiffer’s cat in the movie too but it seemed to be CGIed most of the time.

Look, this isn’t a great movie but it’s not terrible. Bryce Dallas Howard is actually very good as the lead and it has some fun moments. If you go expecting it to be Octopussy meet The Octonauts then you might not be disappointed.

So, it may be named after the classic knitwear diamond motif that my cinema staff member had never heard of, but in this case there’s nothing precious woven into it.