Review: The 355

The 355
Cert: 12A / 123m mins / Dir. Simon Kinberg / Trailer

Let's cut straight to the chase. After all, that's what Simon Kinberg's done: Assembling the high-profile stars of Zero Dark Thirty, Inglorious Basterds, Pain And Glory and Us in order to make The 355 is like getting your hands on an F40 and using it to drive to Tesco. Perfectly serviceable for anyone with no imagination, and a complete waste of resources.

Jessica Chastain plays Mace, a CIA agent whose partner Nick (Sebastian Stan) is killed while the pair are on a mission to recover a piece of priceless tech hardware/weaponry which mustn't fall into the wrong hands (at which point it falls conveniently into the wrong hands). When her superiors claim they're powerless to take the case further, Mace decides to go rogue and recruits German BND operative Marie (Diane Kruger), MI6 hacker Khadijah (Lupita Nyong'o) and psychologist from the Mexican secret service Graciela (Penelope Cruz) to form a team of kick-ass bee-atches who might just save the ruddy world!

Now at this point you're either thinking The 355 sounds fantastic or utterly dreadful. Don't worry, it's neither. The film is staggeringly ordinary.

FILLER

Evoking such superficially passable cinematic filler as Jason Bourne, Unlocked and 21 Bridges, Simon Kinberg and Theresa Rebeck have crafted a sassy cyber thriller where the audience will not fully understand The Threat because the writers themselves do not fully understand The Threat, and are therefore incapable of actually explaining The Threat in any level of credible detail. Look, the macguffin is basically an iPhone-sized device which can make planes fall out of the sky and money fall out of banks at the same time or something. It's like watching a visual representation of the Daily Mail's internal thought processes when someone mentions bitcoin. You know this gadget's important because Jason Flemyng's international bad guy Elijah really wants it despite being the kind of man who has to keep asking his secretary what his password is, and cool-computer-expert Khadijah spouts a full thirty seconds of awed gibberish while looking at a vector graphic display which is supposed to be the user interface. To be fair, at least nobody talks about Unleashing The Hashtags...

Back at the business-end, pursuits and melees (of which there are many) are rendered through fast-cut, closeup montages, while a surprising number of people get shot at point-blank range considering nobody takes a bullet on-camera and you've seen more claret at a vegetarian barbecue. To say the film lacks the courage of its convictions is putting it mildly (hey, they've somehow made a 12A about murderers), and the industrial sequel-baiting in its final moments comes off as a cute joke rather than a tantalising promise or even threat. We shouldn't hold our collective breath for The 356*¹.

STYRENE

Most successful actors knock out An Average Payday a few times in their career, and that's okay. But to have this many great performers all being this average and all at the same time is criminal. The 355 will be at the top of nobody's CV. There's definitely a feeling that from a marketing point-of-view, it's waving a flag for "Hey look, The Girls™ can do action thrillers too!!!". To which the only sensible response is "Okay, but why?". This just means there are more grindingly average punching-films but now with ladies in them. That's just adding to the problem, not fixing it.

Don't get me wrong, the film is technically fine as a two-hour chase sequence dumped out in January, and that in itself is also fine. But at some point in its development The 355 was doing something differently, and now this is all that's left; an absolute staple in the £4 Gift Ideas For Father's Day display in a supermarket.

Is this what 2022 is going to be..?

*¹ It's okay, I know that's not why it's called that. That's the joke. Cool. ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.