The 355 (Review)

The Talented Women of The 355 Save the Day and the Film

I have to admit, I had a bad feeling about The 355 before I even walked into theaters. There was something about the trailer that didn’t thrill me, despite my soft spot for badass heroines and snarky final girls. My sneaking suspicions seemed confirmed when I discovered that The 355 was written by Theresa Rebeck and Simon Kinberg (who also directed the film). For those of you who don’t know, they’re each responsible for two of the worst comic book movies of all time, Catwoman and Dark Phoenix. Now, I try not to hold grudges over these things, but this knowledge tempered my expectations for The 355. Because of that, I didn’t try to fight my disappointment over the cookie-cutter plot or gratuitous use of spy-thriller tropes and was able to recognize some positive aspects of the film, like the stellar ensemble of actresses whose sheer screen presence and charisma actually make The 355 pretty watchable.

The 355 spun the wheel on international espionage thriller cliches and landed on the “stolen tech-doodad that can hack anything” slot. In an attempt to mix it up a bit, the film features a gaggle of lady agents from various international intelligence agencies joining forces to stop the MacGuffin from falling into the wrong hands. Of course, the CIA is the big dawg in charge (Jessica Chastain) with MI-6 (Lupita Nyong’o) serving as the brains. They’re reluctantly joined by some BND muscle (Diane Krueger) and a bit of heart from the DNI (Penélope Cruz). The team’s final member, and the yin to the CIA’s yang (aka the lancer), comes from the MSS (Fan Bingbing) just in time for them to set off on a globe-trotting adventure to save the world from a wanna-be Bond villain (Jason Flemyng) hoping to use the device for unknown, but surely nefarious deeds. 

Simon Kinberg has proven himself to be a pretty good producer and has even written some solid screenplays in the past. His first attempt at directing though was… Well, The 355 is much better than Dark Phoenix. That said, a root canal would be better than Dark Phoenix. While there is a noticeable improvement, the film still suffers from a lot of the same issues, such as a lack of tension, off-balance act structure, and an unmemorable villain. Fleming is an actor who can work wonders with a juicy role, but Elijah Clarke, terrorist financier and all-around bad guy, is drier than beef jerky. I’ve said it before and I’ll say keep saying it, “a hero is only as good as their villain.” There’s a lot more than Elijah undermining the tension in the film. The 355 also struggles to give the potential victims of the “doodad” a face. There are some demonstrations, but the threat remains mostly theoretical. Sure, six planes crashing suddenly is terrible, but reading off some of the victims’ names would have packed a punch. Finally, the film transitions from scene to scene are as smooth as a teen driving stick shift for the first time. Even the cuts within the scenes are choppy and constantly force the viewer to reorient themselves. Those elements make it difficult to focus on long-term implications since so much effort is spent trying to figure out what’s happening at the moment.   

The plot of The 355 is as trite as it gets, but there’s something about those tropes that make them almost like cinematic comfort food. Sure, I know it’s terrible and probably pretty bad for me, but I’m going to eat it up. At the same time, no matter how tried and true a recipe might be, the quality of the ingredients still matter. The 355 displays the culinary sophistication of a stoned college kid cooking on a budget leading to severely under-seasoned characters and a plot full of processed preservatives. Shockingly, when it comes to the casting, The 355 reaches for Kobe beef. I’ve stretched this cooking metaphor far enough, but the point is that the leading ladies are the kind of women who could make terms and conditions interesting. They share screentime with Sebastian Stan, who is another actor whose screen presence is capable of salvaging poorly written characters. Despite a cast of women, you can’t take your eyes off of, I couldn’t help rolling them from time to time, and even cringed a little (Fan Bingbing’s character actually says “ancient Chinese secret”). As likable as the actresses are, I simply don’t have any desire to see their characters again.

The 355 primary sin though is that there is absolutely no evidence that any of the roles were written for women. For all intents and purposes, every single character’s character could be flipped and the only changes that would need to be made would be pronouns. This is a problem I’ve seen more times than I can count when men write and direct female protagonists, and I was hoping that Theresa Rebeck would add a bit of perspective to the script, but every single one of the women simply pulls from a grab bag of spy character internal conflicts. Look, I’ve never been one to subscribe to the notion of gender roles and believe that a woman can do any job a man can, but that doesn’t negate the fact that nature and nurture have an impact on how someone goes about getting a job done. In other words, having a 120-pound woman trade punches with a 200-pound man feels wrong, but The 355 lacks the creativity to utilize the same sort of combat pragmatism seen in movies like John Wick, Jason Bourne, Upgrade, and Atomic Blonde. Heck, it doesn’t even let the women wear practical shoes during the foot chases. I will relent by applauding one or two of the cleverer ploys used, especially during their trip to Morocco.  

Essentially, The 355 is exactly the kind of mediocre action movie you’d expect to find dumped in the cinematic elephant graveyard that is January. In all my years as a movie critic, I’ve never once seen anything good released in theaters during the first three weeks of the year. It’s the sort of movie you’d expect to see offered as the “in-flight entertainment” for a flight from New York to LA. It’s got some recognizable names and enough entertainment the help pass the time, but it lacks the substance to leave any sort of impression. Well, that’s not exactly true, because I distinctly remember thinking to myself as I left the theater, “there are so many women who would be incredible action heroines. They just need better roles written for them.”