The 355

Coming out as one of the first movies of 2022, The 355 pulls together an all-women action force to attempt to make a splash in the genre of action films.

The 355 is an ensemble action film where a CIA agent (Jessica Chastain) joins together with three international agents (Diane Kruger, Penelope Cruz, and Lupita Nyong’o) to stop a top-secret world-ending weapon from falling into the hands of a band of mercenaries while also staying ahead from a mysterious woman tracking their every move (BingBing Fan).

Starting with the positives, the five main actresses pull off a convincing performance of playing government agents. Others have criticized the film saying that women are not believably battling these large brawny men. However, I did not find an issue with this, noticing that how the choreography was done made sense with how the women were able to take over the larger foes.

Unfortunately aside from this, there was nothing else positive about the film. The main issue is that there was nothing to make this film stand out from any other action film. No standout action sequence, no stand-out character, and definitely not a stand-out plot. Outside of the general lack of originality, I found this movie to be extremely predictable. The “big twist” in the second act was very easy to predict within the first 10 minutes of the movie.

This movie is also guilty of the action movie trope of faking out the protagonist winning in the second act of the film. This film attempted to pull this off twice, playing the audience into thinking the agents won and would be going home because they saved the day. Having it happen twice within the film makes it seem like the writers did not know how to transition between the three acts and just used the laziest trick they knew.

Finally, there is a lack of chemistry between the leads in the film. Though they all do a good job of pulling off the spy role, there is no banter or overall likeability between the team as a whole. It feels like 5 random actresses thrown together with no attempt made to see if they can play off of each other.

Unfortunately as a whole, the movie is just a generic forgettable action movie with no standout cast members or action sequences and a very predictable overused plot. The movie doesn’t do anything inherently bad but it doesn’t try to do anything good to stand out either. To describe this film in one word, bland.

Grade: C Score:5/10 Recommendation: Skip it