"Strong female characters"
It's impressive, in its way: 2022 managed to produce a worse wide-release film than the whole of 2021 on literally its very first try. The 355, the first movie of the new year, makes virtually no right choices, and arguably started that habit before pre-production, before development even, when 355 star/producer Jessica Chastain and director Simon Kinberg started chatting on the set of Dark Phoenix about how great it would be to collaborate on a movie about an all-woman team of international superspies. And really, if you're on that set in 2018, working with that director, and you decide that he's a great fit for one of the first projects to come out of your newborn production company (Chastain's Freckle Films was launched in 2016,* but its first release wasn't until Ava in 2020), I have to question everything about your good sense.
But let us not solely blame Chastain for The 355, nor Kinberg, though I think it is very clearly the case that neither of those people deserves to get off scot-free. It's just bad, a top-to-bottom failure that has an overworked, underflavored script by Theresa Rebeck and Kinberg (I will do Rebeck, a well-regarded playwright, the honor of assuming that Kinberg's rewrites took a hatchet to her original draft), and on top of that scrawny, rickety foundation builds out a disastrously ill-made collection of some of the most illegible action scenes that a film with a budget of not less than $40 million could conceivably possess. To hell with "worse than anything from 2021"; it's worse on the fundamentals of filmmaking than any other wide-release film I've seen since the debacle of Proud Mary, released four years earlier to the month.
Let us spend just a moment digging into this. Right in the very first scene, we're already getting a good sense of the unholy depths to which The 355 is going to be capable of sinking. The situation: in Colombia, a couple of hundred miles into the jungle outside of Bogotá, a druglord named Santiago (Pablo Scola) has welcomed a nefarious international criminal mastermind, Elijah Clarke (Jason Flemyng), into his well-appointed jungle palazzo for a trade. Santiago's people have developed an extraordinary new program, some sort of science magic installed on a portable drive that gives the operator the ability to hack into any computer system on earth, allowing you to e.g. turn off the power grids of entire cities, or crash planes. So it's great, because we've got both the hoariest cliché of 1980s action cinema and the hoariest cliché of 1990s action cinema, and we're not even 90 seconds into the film yet. Long story short, Clarke double-crosses Santiago, there's a big shoot-out that leaves a lot of people dead, and in the chaos, Agent Luis Rojas (Édgar Ramírez) of the Colombian intelligence agency DNI has managed to snatch the one and only drive that can possibly be made with the super-deadly code.
In order to get to that point, The 355 has trotted out some of the most ghastly, wholly unacceptable filmmaking that I can imagine coming from the hands of alleged professionals. Some highlights: during one highly fraught moment, indeed right before the betrayal, Clarke looks to the right, in the direction that, thus far in the scene, has been established as "towards Santiago". Cut to: Santiago, from an angle we haven't seen yet, looking right and forward towards Clarke in a shot that strongly implies he's sitting behind the other man (I am possibly mixing the two up, but it's definitely those two characters). Or: a soldier points his rifle at a man on the floor, and pulls the trigger. Muzzle flash on the cut. New shot: the same angle, and shame shot scale, as the last shot of soldier with the rifle, but he's shifted a little bit. It looks like a different take of the same shot. Or: as Ramírez picks his way around the set, he enters a shot in medium close-up; the camera pulls back to a high extreme wide shot. It appears that they were faking a crane shot by putting the camera on a drone, and flying it back up towards the ceiling, and the reason I think this is that the drone is very obviously wobbling left and right - perhaps it hit the ceiling? Perhaps there was a draft? Perhaps the weight of the rig hadn't been balanced properly? I will also assume that they cut The 355 in Avid Media Composer, because Adobe Premiere Pro has a pretty simply tool that allows you to fix wobbles, and surely they would have fixed it. Though perhaps not, since I imagine that editors John Gilbert and Lee Smith were busily on the hunt for new places to introduce jump cuts.
But, credit where credit's due: this is still less horrible than Proud Mary, since at least there are no points where it appears that sound mixer Tom Williams keeled over dead on set, allowing airplane noises to swamp the dialogue. Indeed, I could hear every line of dialogue in The 355 perfectly, though it was not often the case that this fact made me happy.
Once the film properly gets going, it focuses on CIA Agent Mason "Mace" Browne (Chastain), whose nickname comes from the fact that at the end of watching her for two hours, my eyes were burning red and running with tears, and I couldn't feel the skin on my face. She's the operative sent by the U.S. to track down Rojas, who has bolted in a panic to do anything to get rid of the damn drive, including contacting every intelligence agency and terrorist group in the world in an attempt to sell it. This brings not just Mace, but other shadowy figures to Paris, where we learn that she is taciturn and has intimacy issues, in a conversation with her flirty partner Nick Fowler (Sebastian Stan), that goes something like this:
NICK: "Haven't you ever wondered if you and I should fuck?"
MACE: "I actually haven't, no. That would be creepy and gross."
NICK: "Would you like to fuck now?"
MACE: "I sure would!"
This is all it takes to make Mace feel the pang of human connection for the first time in her (professional?) life, so that she will be extremely sad when Nick is killed horribly. Since this happens offscreen, and he is played by the most recognisable male in the cast, we know for certain that he really is dead, and will absolutely not be coming back halfway through the second act to be revealed as the film's secret villain. Anyway, Mace now wants revenge and the plane-crasher Macguffin, so she reluctantly teams up with Marie Schmidt (Diane Kruger), an agent of Germany's BND, and the person who fucked up the Americans' attempt to get the drive in the first place. She also calls in a favor with her good friend, retired MI6 agent Khadijah Adiyeme (Lupita Nyong'o), a tech genius happily living a quiet life in London. And the three of them also rope in Graciela Rivera (Penélope Cruz), a psychotherapist in the employ of the DNI who worked with their agents to make sure they weren't about to snap in some horrible way, and had come to Paris to try and convince her patient Rojas to just calm the fuck down before he does something silly like allow the drive to fall into the hands of an international crime syndicate. Oops, she failed.
These four tough ladies, and their extremely well-defined vibrant, and wholly fresh personalities (Mace=Hardass, Graciela=Meek, Khadijah=Voice of Reason, Marie=Mace, with a German Accent), team up to form an unstoppable group of superspies, the kind that might give themsleves a badass name, like "The 355". Except they never do, and the film leaves the explanation of its title all the way at the end, when Mace mentions, rather irrelevantly to anything then going on, that "Agent 355" was a female spy working for George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. And, like, that's a movie. I bet you could even cast Chastain still, she'd be able to sell 18th Century pretty well, I think. But sadly, this 355 is not that 355, and this 355 isn't aught but subpar faux-James Bond balderdash (the kind that sees fit to include the ol' "but James Bond is a movie, this is real" gag in dialogue). The team schleps from place to place, using their feminine wiles to outsmart the men trying to kill them - at one point, they have the brilliant idea that they can sneak through a crowded Marrakesh marketplace undetected by wearing hijab, and I am not sure if this one of the cleverest or the most racist things in the film. Given this script, it could easily be both.
Along the way, they pick up a Chinese agent, Lin Mi Sheng (Fan Bingbing, in her first big screen role since her great unexplained disappearance in 2018 that, depending on the rumors you like best, may have been because she had inadvertently become an enemy of the Chinese government. Given that The 355 is a Chinese co-production - with all the worst aesthetic implications that "an American/Chinese co-production" can call to mind - they apparently patched things up). And thus their nice little collection of global powers is wrapped up (getting Gal Gadot to play a Mossad agent would presumably have been too on the nose, or maybe they were hoping to save that for the sequel; and this catastrophic box office failure does indeed end with a sequel hook, bless its heart), and I am sure we are meant to find this very inspiring, though casting a Spaniard and a Venezuelan as Colombians, and having the Chinese superspy use the phrase "ancient Chinese herbs" - twice - does at least somewhat put a dent in the film's woke bona fides, I should think.
Nothing in all of this works: Mace is such a slapdash collection of ossified clichés that the film's attempt to build an emotional arc around her doesn't come to any sort of conclusion, and its hackneyed attempt to give the other women big emotional beats - all of them involving holding a gun to the heads of the men in their lives - fall apart without conviction, and with none of the overqualified cast other than Nyong'o apparently even trying to take this seriously. The whole film is plagued by such sloppy camerawork, under the guiding hand of cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones, and such deranged, actively incomprehensible, that one can barely make sense of its action scenes at all, other than to note in some abstract sense that you can generally tell when the good guys are winning. Which they typically are, since even by threatening to kill Graciela's children, the film cannot create a sense of stakes, treating the idea of mass death as essentially trivial (six passenger planes are crashed in the exposition), and never really raising the possibility that Mace isn't three or four steps ahead of everyone trying to stop her. It is, all told, a miserable, gloomy experience: hard to follow and unsatisfying when you can follow it, noisy and hectic while being so messy that it's tedious rather than exciting, and weighed down by trite characterisations, dialogue, situations, and technobabble. Just a horrible cinematic experience all around.
*Freckle Films, incidentally, claims as one of its stated goals "supporting and nurturing female talent", and the three films it has released to date have been directed by Tate Taylor, Michael Showalter, and Kinberg. I offer no judgment about this fact, but I am giving Freckle Films a good, long, probing stare over the top rim of my eyeglasses.
But let us not solely blame Chastain for The 355, nor Kinberg, though I think it is very clearly the case that neither of those people deserves to get off scot-free. It's just bad, a top-to-bottom failure that has an overworked, underflavored script by Theresa Rebeck and Kinberg (I will do Rebeck, a well-regarded playwright, the honor of assuming that Kinberg's rewrites took a hatchet to her original draft), and on top of that scrawny, rickety foundation builds out a disastrously ill-made collection of some of the most illegible action scenes that a film with a budget of not less than $40 million could conceivably possess. To hell with "worse than anything from 2021"; it's worse on the fundamentals of filmmaking than any other wide-release film I've seen since the debacle of Proud Mary, released four years earlier to the month.
Let us spend just a moment digging into this. Right in the very first scene, we're already getting a good sense of the unholy depths to which The 355 is going to be capable of sinking. The situation: in Colombia, a couple of hundred miles into the jungle outside of Bogotá, a druglord named Santiago (Pablo Scola) has welcomed a nefarious international criminal mastermind, Elijah Clarke (Jason Flemyng), into his well-appointed jungle palazzo for a trade. Santiago's people have developed an extraordinary new program, some sort of science magic installed on a portable drive that gives the operator the ability to hack into any computer system on earth, allowing you to e.g. turn off the power grids of entire cities, or crash planes. So it's great, because we've got both the hoariest cliché of 1980s action cinema and the hoariest cliché of 1990s action cinema, and we're not even 90 seconds into the film yet. Long story short, Clarke double-crosses Santiago, there's a big shoot-out that leaves a lot of people dead, and in the chaos, Agent Luis Rojas (Édgar Ramírez) of the Colombian intelligence agency DNI has managed to snatch the one and only drive that can possibly be made with the super-deadly code.
In order to get to that point, The 355 has trotted out some of the most ghastly, wholly unacceptable filmmaking that I can imagine coming from the hands of alleged professionals. Some highlights: during one highly fraught moment, indeed right before the betrayal, Clarke looks to the right, in the direction that, thus far in the scene, has been established as "towards Santiago". Cut to: Santiago, from an angle we haven't seen yet, looking right and forward towards Clarke in a shot that strongly implies he's sitting behind the other man (I am possibly mixing the two up, but it's definitely those two characters). Or: a soldier points his rifle at a man on the floor, and pulls the trigger. Muzzle flash on the cut. New shot: the same angle, and shame shot scale, as the last shot of soldier with the rifle, but he's shifted a little bit. It looks like a different take of the same shot. Or: as Ramírez picks his way around the set, he enters a shot in medium close-up; the camera pulls back to a high extreme wide shot. It appears that they were faking a crane shot by putting the camera on a drone, and flying it back up towards the ceiling, and the reason I think this is that the drone is very obviously wobbling left and right - perhaps it hit the ceiling? Perhaps there was a draft? Perhaps the weight of the rig hadn't been balanced properly? I will also assume that they cut The 355 in Avid Media Composer, because Adobe Premiere Pro has a pretty simply tool that allows you to fix wobbles, and surely they would have fixed it. Though perhaps not, since I imagine that editors John Gilbert and Lee Smith were busily on the hunt for new places to introduce jump cuts.
But, credit where credit's due: this is still less horrible than Proud Mary, since at least there are no points where it appears that sound mixer Tom Williams keeled over dead on set, allowing airplane noises to swamp the dialogue. Indeed, I could hear every line of dialogue in The 355 perfectly, though it was not often the case that this fact made me happy.
Once the film properly gets going, it focuses on CIA Agent Mason "Mace" Browne (Chastain), whose nickname comes from the fact that at the end of watching her for two hours, my eyes were burning red and running with tears, and I couldn't feel the skin on my face. She's the operative sent by the U.S. to track down Rojas, who has bolted in a panic to do anything to get rid of the damn drive, including contacting every intelligence agency and terrorist group in the world in an attempt to sell it. This brings not just Mace, but other shadowy figures to Paris, where we learn that she is taciturn and has intimacy issues, in a conversation with her flirty partner Nick Fowler (Sebastian Stan), that goes something like this:
NICK: "Haven't you ever wondered if you and I should fuck?"
MACE: "I actually haven't, no. That would be creepy and gross."
NICK: "Would you like to fuck now?"
MACE: "I sure would!"
This is all it takes to make Mace feel the pang of human connection for the first time in her (professional?) life, so that she will be extremely sad when Nick is killed horribly. Since this happens offscreen, and he is played by the most recognisable male in the cast, we know for certain that he really is dead, and will absolutely not be coming back halfway through the second act to be revealed as the film's secret villain. Anyway, Mace now wants revenge and the plane-crasher Macguffin, so she reluctantly teams up with Marie Schmidt (Diane Kruger), an agent of Germany's BND, and the person who fucked up the Americans' attempt to get the drive in the first place. She also calls in a favor with her good friend, retired MI6 agent Khadijah Adiyeme (Lupita Nyong'o), a tech genius happily living a quiet life in London. And the three of them also rope in Graciela Rivera (Penélope Cruz), a psychotherapist in the employ of the DNI who worked with their agents to make sure they weren't about to snap in some horrible way, and had come to Paris to try and convince her patient Rojas to just calm the fuck down before he does something silly like allow the drive to fall into the hands of an international crime syndicate. Oops, she failed.
These four tough ladies, and their extremely well-defined vibrant, and wholly fresh personalities (Mace=Hardass, Graciela=Meek, Khadijah=Voice of Reason, Marie=Mace, with a German Accent), team up to form an unstoppable group of superspies, the kind that might give themsleves a badass name, like "The 355". Except they never do, and the film leaves the explanation of its title all the way at the end, when Mace mentions, rather irrelevantly to anything then going on, that "Agent 355" was a female spy working for George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. And, like, that's a movie. I bet you could even cast Chastain still, she'd be able to sell 18th Century pretty well, I think. But sadly, this 355 is not that 355, and this 355 isn't aught but subpar faux-James Bond balderdash (the kind that sees fit to include the ol' "but James Bond is a movie, this is real" gag in dialogue). The team schleps from place to place, using their feminine wiles to outsmart the men trying to kill them - at one point, they have the brilliant idea that they can sneak through a crowded Marrakesh marketplace undetected by wearing hijab, and I am not sure if this one of the cleverest or the most racist things in the film. Given this script, it could easily be both.
Along the way, they pick up a Chinese agent, Lin Mi Sheng (Fan Bingbing, in her first big screen role since her great unexplained disappearance in 2018 that, depending on the rumors you like best, may have been because she had inadvertently become an enemy of the Chinese government. Given that The 355 is a Chinese co-production - with all the worst aesthetic implications that "an American/Chinese co-production" can call to mind - they apparently patched things up). And thus their nice little collection of global powers is wrapped up (getting Gal Gadot to play a Mossad agent would presumably have been too on the nose, or maybe they were hoping to save that for the sequel; and this catastrophic box office failure does indeed end with a sequel hook, bless its heart), and I am sure we are meant to find this very inspiring, though casting a Spaniard and a Venezuelan as Colombians, and having the Chinese superspy use the phrase "ancient Chinese herbs" - twice - does at least somewhat put a dent in the film's woke bona fides, I should think.
Nothing in all of this works: Mace is such a slapdash collection of ossified clichés that the film's attempt to build an emotional arc around her doesn't come to any sort of conclusion, and its hackneyed attempt to give the other women big emotional beats - all of them involving holding a gun to the heads of the men in their lives - fall apart without conviction, and with none of the overqualified cast other than Nyong'o apparently even trying to take this seriously. The whole film is plagued by such sloppy camerawork, under the guiding hand of cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones, and such deranged, actively incomprehensible, that one can barely make sense of its action scenes at all, other than to note in some abstract sense that you can generally tell when the good guys are winning. Which they typically are, since even by threatening to kill Graciela's children, the film cannot create a sense of stakes, treating the idea of mass death as essentially trivial (six passenger planes are crashed in the exposition), and never really raising the possibility that Mace isn't three or four steps ahead of everyone trying to stop her. It is, all told, a miserable, gloomy experience: hard to follow and unsatisfying when you can follow it, noisy and hectic while being so messy that it's tedious rather than exciting, and weighed down by trite characterisations, dialogue, situations, and technobabble. Just a horrible cinematic experience all around.
*Freckle Films, incidentally, claims as one of its stated goals "supporting and nurturing female talent", and the three films it has released to date have been directed by Tate Taylor, Michael Showalter, and Kinberg. I offer no judgment about this fact, but I am giving Freckle Films a good, long, probing stare over the top rim of my eyeglasses.
Categories: action, crimes against art, spy films, thrillers
