ARGYLLE ★★★

(M) 139 minutes

British filmmaker Matthew Vaughn has a formula. He turns spy movies into farces full of lavishly choreographed fight scenes showing a gleeful disregard for collateral damage. Set to music, they seemingly see death and destruction as the background to a dance routine.

And he never has any trouble attracting starry casts. Colin Firth, Ralph Fiennes, Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore turned out for his Kingsman series. Now Jackson is back for Argylle and like the rest of the cast, he’s nobly done his best to boost the film’s fun factor in some excruciatingly laboured interviews on YouTube.

Vaughn, too, has been doing his bit, fomenting a mystery about the author of the book on which the script is based. A novel, it’s been published under the nom de plume Elly Conway, which happens to be the name of the film’s main character. Played by Bryce Dallas Howard, she’s a mild-mannered novelist whose latest work – all fiction as far as she knows – skates dangerously close to the exploits of an actual spy network with sinister intentions.

As usual with Vaughn, you’re whisked from one scenic location to another and there’s a touch of 007 in the casting of Henry Cavill as Agent Argylle. At least he’s the Argylle from the novels, which are partly dramatised as excerpts from Elly’s imagination. In Elly’s real-life adventures, Cavill has only a bit part. As she rockets from one near-death experience to another, she’s kept alive by Sam Rockwell as a scruffier and more cocky version of the spies in her books.

While the plot twists multiply, along with the double and triple crosses, the pair shoot up trains, leap from high buildings if they don’t blow them up first and take on armies of would-be assassins. Through it all, Elly is doing everything she can to protect her cat, Alfie, which watches the show from her backpack, wearing a justifiably bemused expression.