“Argylle” is the type of movie you would see make $350 million in the box office 20 years ago. It’s an original, action-packed movie stuffed with big stars.

But the box office post-pandemic isn’t what it was, and non-franchise films often have an uphill battle even to get a theatrical release these days.

But that isn’t true for Apple’s “Argylle” with its whopping $200 million dollar budget. The film follows successful author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), who accidentally writes a series of books that perfectly coincide with the real-life espionage activities of an evil spy organization called the Division. Thus ensues a globe-trotting quest to find the “Masterkey” that will stop the Division and help Elly figure out who she really is.

The star ensemble cast is filled out with Sam Rockwell, Henry Cavill, John Cena, Dua Lipa, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara and Samuel L. Jackson.

This could all be the makings of a successful box office run (it’s made $35 million so far) if the film was good. And it could have been, if it didn’t clock in at two hours and 15 minutes. The plot here gets unintelligible around the hour and a half mark once there are two too many plot twists.

It doesn’t help that the first 30 minutes of the film take place in a half-reality, half-fiction so that I still don’t know which scenes were real and which weren’t.

As for the action, it seems like most of the film’s budget was spent on paying its star ensemble’s hefty contracts rather than its VFX artists.

That’s all to say that if the movie cut about 45 minutes of its runtime, it could be as successful as some of the mid-budget non-franchise successes of the early 2000s.

The film’s lack of success so far is especially surprising because of how wide open the first two months of this year are for theatrical releases. The only notable film getting a wide release before Warner’s blockbuster “Dune: Part Two” on March 1 is Sony’s “Madame Web” on Feb. 14, whose entry looks dubious considering that the film is already being considered a “worse Morbius” on X, formerly known as Twitter.

For now, take your theatrical viewing time to the indie theaters to study up on Best Picture nominees “American Fiction” and “The Zone of Interest” in preparation for the Oscars ceremony on March 10; hopefully those won’t be a waste of your time.

Anya Capistrant-Kinney can be reached at capi2087@stthomas.edu.