Language: English
Five super actresses sharing six Oscar nominations (with two wins) between them topline an uber-glam action package shot across continents, dutifully checking the boxes of inclusivity and political correctness. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty, if you don’t have a story to tell.
Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o and Fan Bingbing would seem like a dream star cast in a film that wants to underline sexy badass spy action is not necessarily a macho prerogative for James Bond or Jason Bourne to bask in. Chastain and director Simon Kinberg, who also function as producers, have roped in playwright-author and occasional screenwriter Theresa Rebeck to pen the script and also collaborate on the film’s screenplay. Rebeck’s commitment to rendering a feminist edge to her works has been widely lauded.
Given a cursory look, The 355 would naturally seem like an interesting experiment within the mainstream format. The film tries highlighting the reorganised ground rules of New Hollywood while retaining the swagger of vintage action entertainers, and serving it up with updated tech-specs.
Yet, as the five powerpuff girls get on the action trail to save the world (what else?), you sense early on the experiment itself is dated. Beneath the pile of dumb, showy set-pieces lies a story that is half-baked and hackneyed. Gloss over the fact that watching The 355 is like a sitting through a rehash of all the potboiler stunt fests that male superstars of the eighties routinely thrived on. Even if you were to talk of Hollywood’s newfound love for women-centric entertainers, this sort of an exercise does more disservice to the movement than good.
The 355 takes the worst of cliches that ever defined ‘heroism’ in brainless male-centric action fests and uses these to set up a narrative for its phenomenal all-woman star cast. The sheer waste of talent and possibilities becomes only too blatant as the narrative moves ahead aimlessly.
As a woman-centric spy thriller too, the template appears exhausted. Think Charlie’s Angels, first on TV in the seventies and then remade without much imagination as a bloated, big-budget movie franchise in the noughties (plus the needless reboot of 2019). Down the decades, many top female stars including Angeline Jolie (Salt), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Geena Davis (Long Kiss Goodnight), Jennifer Lawrence (Red Sparrow), Naomi Watts (Fair Game), Charlize Theron (Atomic Blonde) and Judi Dench (Red Joan) have played out the alpha spy on the Hollywood screen with aplomb. Kinberg’s new directorial appears to randomly borrow generic gigs from such hits while setting up a caper for his protagonists.
The idea to name the film The 355 is a nice touch, though. The title refers to a female spy during the American Revolution, whose code name was Agent 355 and whose real identity remains unknown till date. But if the title is impressive, not so the film itself.
Kinberg and Rebeck’s screenplay sets up quite a roster of inclusivity with the characters. All-American heroine Mace (Chastain) is a CIA operative who must team up with British girl Khadijah (Nyong’o), an ex-MI6 agent and computer expert. Their objective is to locate and retrieve a drive with a decryption program that can access and disable any digital system on the planet (“they get this, they start World War III,” Mace tells Khadijah in a solemn tone, though the line appears way too cheesy for such an impact). “They” are a bunch of power-hungry evil men, naturally, on the prowl to grab the drive. Mace and Khadijah must join hands with a German agent named Marie (Kruger) to avert disaster. For the sake of some drama, Mace and Marie’s history of resentment comes in the way, though it takes just one pep talk from Khadijah for the two to reconcile. As the poorly imagined and executed stunt-and-chase drill begins, a Colombian psychologist named Graciela (Penelope Cruz) gets involved in the events. The portrait of diversity completes itself with the late entry of Lin (Bingbing), a Chinese woman with mysterious motives.
The film struggles to engage from the word go and the effect remains likewise even after a runtime of two-odd hours has exhausted its barrage of CGI-loaded action and patchy shots at suspense. In a narrative that heads nowhere, Tim Maurice-Jones’ cinematography is flashy but not visually striking enough to hold interest. As the action hurtles from the streets of Paris to quaint Moroccan souks and onto plush auction houses in Shanghai, the editing (John Gilbert and Lee Smith) is too hasty for impact. Technically, although the film looks state of the art, the end product is too dated to excite.
It is a film that pretends to be smarter than it actually is, one that does not accord much intelligence to its viewers. Not surprisingly the action unfolds through one-dimensional characters, created without investing much of a thought process. When the lead cast isn’t busy repeating stunt sequences from a zillion action films of yore, they mouth corny lines you thought had become extinct from commercial cinema long ago (Chinese agent Lin to her American counterpart Mace: “We put ourselves in danger so that others are not. We all look different, speak different but we are the same”). In a screenplay where actors of the calibre of Cruz, Chastain, Nyong’o and Kruger struggle to leave a mark despite authorbacked footage, the supporting cast (Sebastian Stan, Edgar Ramirez and Jason Flemyng in particular) understandably gets a raw deal. Without giving away spoilers, the only character in the story that gets some sort of an arch, moving from being likeable to worth loathing, is too much of a Hollywood cliché to shock.
The presence of the men in the story is mainly used to showcase the ‘real worlds’ of the five heroines, as wives, girlfriends and mothers — in short, as women next door with jobs that takes them away once in a while. These sub plots could have added depth to an otherwise pointless film if credibly fleshed out. They end up as slipshod as everything else about the film.
The 355 is available 15 April onwards on BookMyShow Stream
Rating: * * (two stars)
Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.
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