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The 355 Reviews

The 355 left me frustrated and disappointed A great concept An excellent cast & terrible pacing, execution, & even one note characters.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

While The 355 certainly does not bring anything electrifying to the action genre, there is something wonderful about seeing an action movie led by five women who are 38 years old or older.

Here’s the 411 on The 355 — it’s a bloated bore.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 2, 2022

The 355 could've been a much better spy thriller under a more capable director, but the kick-ass, highly-capable female cast saves the movie and made this an enjoyable action movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 3, 2022

“The 355” won’t exactly stick with you long after seeing it, nor is it the kind of movie that will wow you with its originality and vision. But it is light and breezy entertainment that happily wears its influences on it’s sleeve.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 16, 2022

Oh-so-basic with its killer lady spies, their battle against misogyny and their quest to claim some much-needed on-screen space.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2022

A rehash of countless similar films, just as mediocre or insufferable, but here male camaraderie is replaced by female complicity. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 16, 2022

In this tangle of platitudes, feminist discourses, and vertiginous persecutions, the film is nothing more than a clumsy reflection of what it wants to enfranchise itself from. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 18, 2022

Offers no great surprises. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 16, 2022

The fact that the end product of this dream team-up is so bland and uninspired makes it feel that much more disappointing.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | May 9, 2022

So if most of the cast delivers, what's the problem? Clues point to Kinberg and Theresa Rebeck's script. It throws around terms like "brush pass" and "kill box," but also gives us dialogue like this: "A man must cover his tracks." "Yes he does." ...what?

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 19, 2022

This film is an exercise in formula with an eye to setting up sequels, and the main reason it works as well as it does is the chemistry between the lead players.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2022

Aggressively average.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 26, 2022

The 355 boasts an incredible cast of powerhouse actresses from around the world, who are given a bland, formulaic script unbefitting of their talent.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Mar 25, 2022

What The 355 offers up is a perfect Saturday afternoon dad movie, but instead of starring Stallone or Eastwood or Bronson, it stars five women with six Oscar nominations and two wins between them. (And was written by the creator of NBCs Smash!)

Full Review | Mar 19, 2022

...the arms-length atmosphere compounded by a continuing emphasis on ineffective, lackluster set-pieces...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 26, 2022

This movie might have an incredible cast, but that doesnt save it from being completely mediocre, very forgettable, and honestly, a bit dull.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 23, 2022

The main problem is that Kinberg, a better screenwriter and producer than director, hired award-caliber actors to play low-grade roles. It didn't work.

Full Review | Original Score: F | Feb 12, 2022

Despite the amazing work of its cast, this espionage saga lacks thrills and originality. Full Review in Spanish

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 12, 2022

The movie has all the potential of being unchallenging escapist entertainment, but it's all too familiar to distinguish itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 11, 2022

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‘The 355’ Review: Exile in Bondville

Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o, Diane Kruger and Fan Bingbing star in an espionage thriller that’s slick but banal.

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By Amy Nicholson

Two centuries before James Bond 007, there was Agent 355, a lady spy on George Washington’s side during the American Revolutionary War who helped identify the turncoat Benedict Arnold . Her name was hidden from history, but her code number has been claimed by this slick and grim espionage flick that aspires to become an all-star, all-female franchise — the Spice Girls version of Bond. Jessica Chastain, a producer and star of the movie, even used Twitter to crowdsource casting suggestions for a “#BondBoy.”

Why not? But we’re going to need a better plot than one built around a bunch of heroes and terrorists chasing after yet another doomsday gizmo. Chastain’s Mace Browne, a C.I.A. workaholic repulsed by romantic commitment, is hellbent on securing a one-of-a-kind cyber-whatsit able to hack into and hijack any computer-controlled device on the planet, from a power grid to a plane. This device could start World War III, Mace warns an MI6 computer whiz, Khadijah (Lupita Nyong’o), in a rusty clunker of a line that warns the audience that the only novelty in Simon Kinberg’s thriller is the cast. It doesn’t take a super sleuth to fill in the rest. There will be lectures on teamwork, confessions squeezed out “the easy way or the hard way” and speeches about the invisible front lines of modern warfare, all rote hubbub building toward a blowout gun battle that makes sure to set aside a bad boyfriend for a sequel.

But what a cast. Chastain and Nyong’o rumble with Diane Kruger, peer pressure Penélope Cruz and are struck dumb by Fan Bingbing , who saunters in halfway through to shake things up. Individually, the women represent the differing national security interests of the United States, England, Germany, Colombia and China; their pitiful male colleagues, however — the lovesick partner (Sebastian Stan) who uses a sting operation to make Mace playact as his fiancée, the distrustful boss (Sylvester Groth) who diagnoses Kruger’s near-feral street fighter with daddy issues — make a case for the women to form a feminist Brawlers Without Borders.

Kinberg and Theresa Rebeck’s screenplay races through five continents, and as many betrayals and switcheroos. (The cinematographer, Tim Maurice-Jones, seems most inspired by Shanghai’s iridescent neon blues.) The filmmaking deserves credit for refusing to leer as the ladies convincingly kick and punch — all focus is on the stunts, not on sex appeal.

Yet there’s a sense that “The 355” felt forced to pick between being sincere or being fun. It chose solemnity. As a result, it’s flat-footed even when the setups yearn to be playful. Viewers are not invited to giggle when a pursuit detours into a men-only bathhouse, or at a surreal moment in an undercover sequence when Chastain rips off her red wig disguise to reveal … her own identical red hair. The drums thunder as though they’re dead-serious about proving that women can make an expensive adventure that’s every bit as banal as the ones that boys crank out every month with basically the same plot. At least Cruz is allowed to get a laugh in a scene where her married soccer mom learns to flirt with a patsy. The twinkle in her eyes looks just like Sean Connery’s seductive gleam.

The 355 Rated PG-13 for copious male corpses. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters.

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Penelope Cruz, Jessica Chastain, Diane Kruger and Lupita Nyong'o in The 355

The 355 review – Jessica Chastain-led action thriller is a disappointing dud

The Oscar nominee leads an impressive cast in a frustratingly rote caper that ends up being as forgettable as its title

W hile X-Men scribe Simon Kinberg’s junky action thriller chooses not to reveal the meaning behind its truly forgettable title until the end (one of his many bizarre decisions as writer-director), I’m going to start by explaining that The 355 is a reference to Agent 355, one of America’s first female spies, deployed during the late 18th century, real identity forever unknown. Perhaps the reason we find this out so very late is that a mere whiff of this story ends up being far more dramatically enticing than the film it’s inspired, the first big release of the year doubling up as its first big disappointment.

Back in 2017, while in the middle of shooting another ill-advised disaster – the loathed X-Men spin-off Dark Phoenix – Jessica Chastain approached Kinberg about creating a female-led action thriller in the vein of James Bond and Mission: Impossible. By the following summer, the film was presented to buyers at Cannes by Chastain and co-stars, an appealingly commercial package that was unsurprisingly snapped up fast. Almost four years later, after a delayed release as a result of Covid, whatever might have worked on paper fizzles out on screen, a gussied-up pile of schlock that wastes a cast who deserve so much better. Rather than being worthy of the collective might of Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger and Bingbing Fan, it feels like the kind of bottom shelf dross that Bruce Willis and Jesse Metcalfe would sleepwalk through to pay the bills, piles of cash handed over via grubby manilla envelopes.

The derivative, stitched-together plot focuses on an all-powerful piece of tech that can hack into pretty much anything, crashing planes, tanking power grids and creating chaos for whomever its owner wants. Mace (Chastain) is an agent tasked with bringing it in along with her colleague and best friend Nick (Sebastian Stan). But the plan goes awry and Chastain is left as a lone wolf, forced into partnering with agents from around the world to figure out what happened and who is to blame.

It’s every bit as generic as that sounds, with a hapless, first-draft script from Kinberg and playwright Theresa Rebeck that fails to introduce any surprise, suspense or humour, coasting along on its stretched star cast and good intentions. The genre still remains heavily male-skewed of course but simply replacing male action heroes with women and then standing back waiting for applause isn’t quite enough. There’s been a very slow inch toward a tad more equality of late, with recent female-led streaming efforts like The Old Guard , Kate and Gunpowder Milkshake easily putting The 355 in the shade, and so beyond the logline “what if Bond but with women”, there’s not much else brought to the table. The film also can’t decide if it’s skewering the genre or conforming to it. In one scene, Chastain’s character ridicules the lack of reality in a 007 movie – “James Bond never has to deal with real life” – but just a scene later, just after travelling around the world in an unexplained army plane, the on-the-lam women arrive at a gala with new outfits, new wigs and new tech, reality nowhere to be seen.

Films such as The 355 live and die by the quality of their action set pieces and while there’s a propulsive pace to the proceedings, there’s never quite enough genuine excitement. The fight scenes, of which there are many, are shoddily captured despite game performers and so the action has a numbing effect, confusingly choreographed and ultimately rather boring. Chastain, who recently gave one of her finest performances in The Eyes of Tammy Faye , is a bit flat and muted here without any eccentricities to play with and so doesn’t really convince as the charismatic, take-no-prisoners lead inspiring a ragtag bunch of agents to follow her. There’s not much of interest for Nyong’o, Fan and particularly Cruz to chew on and so it’s Kruger who steals it, stepping in for the originally cast Marion Cotillard, doing a lot with very little. No one expects intricate character development with a barebones film such as this but there’s barely an attempt to even differentiate the characters outside of their nationalities, a film about strong women that reduces them to nobodies.

Like the films it aspires to be like, The 355 ends with the promise of more but even without an Omicron-hit box office and a cursed January release, it’s unlikely that audiences would be clamouring for a sequel. There will be worse films to come this year but not many will be quite as hard to remember by the end of it.

The 355 is out in US and UK cinemas on 7 January