The 355
The 355 directed by Simon Kinberg is the equivalent of a Shonda Rhimes show, melodramatic with glammed up women kicking ass. Despite the flop of X-Men Dark Phoenix Kinberg’s previous directing effort, I expected more from one of the producers of Deadpool 1&2, The Martian, and Logan.
We open with a financier of terrorist organizations, Elijah Clarke (Jason Flemyng), at an international drug dealers house. The dealer is selling Elijah a compact drive that can access and decrypt anything on the internet to create chaos anywhere in the world from crashing airplanes, blacking out cities, and dismantling financial systems and markets. Elijah tries to steal the drive, but Colombian federal agents break into the house. One of the federal agents (Edgar Ramírez) steals the drive as leverage to escape his country and sell it to another intelligence agency. Mace (Jessica Chastain) and her partner Nick (Sebastian Stan) both CIA Agents are sent on a mission to Paris to retrieve the drive before it gets back into the wrong hands. As a mysterious woman disrupts the deal stealing one of the bags in the tradeoff a chase ensues with Nick ending up dead and the drive gone into a web of criminal hands. Being investigated by her direct superior for the death of her partner, Mace, is forced to retrieve the drive on her own and figure out who killed Nick. But she can’t do it alone so she assembles a team of international spies, Khadijah retired MI6 (Lupita Nyong'o), Marie (Diane Kruger) of the BND intelligence service of Germany, and Graciela a psychologist for the Colombian intelligence office (Penélope Cruz) to save the world from WW3.
Since the antagonist of the film is broad and it keeps changing who wants the drive, but ultimately comes down to one specific master criminal made the threat and the stakes intellectually understood, but the deeper personal motives for wanting the drive were not acknowledged. This error created a loss of interest in caring about who had the drive and who killed Nick. It would be like watching the first Mission Impossible and not caring to figure out who setup Ethan Hunt. 355 is dependent on us as an audience buying into the threat in the first scene and continuously building up that tension as the film progresses, but that unfortunately never happened.
The drive can access anything around the world, and the limitless nature of one drive felt like something that would have been in a superhero movie, not an international spy thriller. Even Javier Bardem’s character a cyberterrorist in Skyfall has an entire setup of tech not just one drive.
In an attempt to make the characters more developed they ended up being the standard stereotypes seen in spy thrillers: the tech genius, the agents out in the field who are tough without a family and their life is their job. The odd man out is Penelope Cruz’s character a psychologist never in the field before who becomes annoying for constantly repeating how she can’t continue on.
As if the movie can’t get any worse the ending is the cheesiest pro female empowerment moment. I’m surprised SNL never spoofed it in a sketch.
The 355 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.