The 355
This is exactly the sort of movie you expect in January- disposable escapism that you hope to get some entertainment from. Simon Kinberg gives us exactly that, even if he casts Spaniard Penelope Cruz as a Columbian, while almost everyone else gets to play to their nationality. (Lupita Nyong’o is a Kenyan-Mexican playing a Brit. I suppose her identity could still theoretically work.) Once you decide to put that aside, if you can, “The 355” is fine and entertaining for the women at the center of it.
The film begins in Columbia, where the head of a terrorist organization is trying to get their hands on highly volatile software. (When is software in these films anything else?) When it falls into the wrong hands, CIA agent Mace (Jessica Chastain) and her partner (Sebastian Stan) try to retrieve it for the US, but there are outside parties- like a German spy (Marie, played by Diane Kruger)- who are wanting their hands on it, also. A Columbian agent (Edgar Ramirez) also converges in Paris to get it, but not before a therapist from his agency (Cruz) arrives. When people die during the recovery of the software, Mace, Marie and Graciela (Cruz’s character) team up with Mace’s security expert friend (Khadijah, played by Nyong’o), and another player (Lin Mi Sheng, played by Bingbing Fan) operating behind the scenes.
“The 355” is not a movie you go into expecting much beyond a perfunctory character development and plot mechanics, and that’s exactly what you get here. The screenplay by Kinberg and Theresa Rebeck is a standard action spy movie which Kinberg does a fair job directing, which is to say he doesn’t get in the way of the women completely owning their roles and moments. A more skilled action director like Susanna Fogel (“The Spy Who Dumped Me”), who could also give the actresses room to breathe some extra life into these characters, would have been preferred, but given all that, “The 355” works fine.
I really like the cast of women they put together. Since Chastain was also a producer, and one of the people who kickstarted the project, I’m sure there’s a lot of wish fulfillment for her in being able to work with some of these actresses, while also doing a female-centric spy movie. One of the things that works with this is that there are few moments where the women feel over-sexualized, which is always a concern for something like this. Yes, there are moments when they are dressed to the 9s or girl-on-girl fighting can occur, but we get to know enough about these characters and the lives they’ve lived, to be interested in them beyond the physical allure of them. That means we get some manufactured tension with what this will mean to some of their families, but because all of them are top-notch performers, we feel something when they have to deal with something emotional.
On the whole, “The 355” is pretty much what I expected from it, and even if that’s not a very good movie, I didn’t feel like my time was completely wasted. I credit that to Chastain, Cruz, Kruger and Nyong’o. (Fan, sadly, is underutilized.) If you want a down-the-middle action movie headed by some of the best actresses around, it’s a decent one to check out.
Simon Kinberg gives us exactly that, even if he casts Spaniard Penelope Cruz as a Columbian, while almost everyone else gets to play to their nationality. (Lupita Nyong’o is a Kenyan-Mexican playing a Brit. I suppose her identity could still theoretically work.)
There are millions of ethnic Spanish Columbians. Why get an African to play a “British” spy?