Movie Review: The 355 (PG13 – 122 minutes)

 Agent 355 was the codename of a female spy who worked under General George Washington during the American Revolution. Seems fitting then to use that as the title for this movie about female spies from various agencies coming together to work a case. And honestly, that brief description sounds like the premise for an awesome streaming TV show that I would be all about. 

In Colombia, bad guy Elijah Clarke is picking up a hard drive from a drug lord containing the latest digital weapon – it can shut down any system anywhere!  Things go sideways when Elijah kills the hacker and attempts to get out with the drive while the drug agents who were outside rush in.  In the confusion, one of the agents, Luis, grabs the drive and attempts to pass it off to the CIA for a profit.  Agent Mace heads to Paris with her partner/best friend Nick to pose as a married couple to pick up the drive and give Luis a bag of money.  During the hand off a German agent grabs the bag, Clarke’s people come for the drive, and Nick doesn’t make it out.  Luis meets up with Graciela, a psychologist from his Colombian agency.  Mace is generally furious about all of this and partners up with an old friend named Khadijah from MI-6. They run into Marie, the German agent and they decide to all work together to retrieve the drive and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

The movie is good, but it could have been great, and that is the most disappointing part. The idea was proposed by Jessica Chastain to director Simon Kinberg while working on the X-Men:  Dark Phoenix movie.  Knowing how that movie turned out, I guess it is not a surprise that I wanted more from this movie. I am not convinced Kinberg is a great action director. I appreciated the amount of action in this movie – it felt like most of the lead actresses did as much of the fight scenes as they could, so once again, I would love for directors and editors to stop disrespecting the actors and the audience by throwing hundreds of cuts into a fight scene. Back up the camera and let us see it start to finish – if they work on the stunts, let us see it. 

I am also a little bit over the digital drive weapon-of-terribleness as the new standard macguffin.  It is somewhat necessary here as the level of threat that brings together several spies from different international agencies, which I loved. And like I said – may have been better suited to an epic action streaming TV show with different cases each week.  Here, the story is clunky and somehow both too fast and too slow, with too many endings. None of that is the fault of the cast, who are all great.

I enjoyed Jessica Chastain in Ava and her other action flicks, so I appreciate her in this and that she seems to prefer doing action movies. Mace is cold and efficient and all about the job.  

Lupita Nyong’o gives Khadijah Adiyeme a weariness to the field work as she has shifted to more desk-work. She functions as the tech-wiz for the group – their man-in-the-chair.

Diane Kruger plays Marie Schimdt as another cold as ice agent, marked in her agency as difficult to deal with and ‘only working alone’.

Penelope Cruz plays Graciela Rivera as the agency psychologist and not a field agent – I wish they had given her a backstory of more field action so that she was more prepared and less cowering. I'm a little perplexed as to why her agency sends her in to collect Edgar Ramirez's Luis when he gets in way over his head when he swipes the drive. He has nearly nothing to do here, which is a shame because he is usually very watchable.

Bingbing Fan plays Lin Mi Sheng and due to some tax issues in China, wasn’t as available as she may have been written. I would have preferred this character join the crew a little earlier on, but she was interesting when she finally met up with them.

I really enjoy Jason Flemyng and it was fun to see him as the big bad, but they could have done so much more with him.  Here, he just wants the drive to do some general bad and collect some general millions.

Sebastian Stan plays Nick Fowler, spoiler alert – his heel turn is telegraphed very early. It is fun to see him play a henchman and when he goes dark, he is legitimately threatening.

I love the idea for this, the cast, and the bones of the story, but the execution falls a little flat for me. I rarely want a movie to ‘hit harder’, but I think this may have benefitted from a harder R rating. Some of the scenes feel particularly choppy and may be because they were cut down for the PG13 rating.  Dialing it up may have suited the gravity of the story, and the grittiness the action.  

Chastain functions well as the ‘straight man’ in the group that holds the crew together.  However, with one central straight-man, you need the others to be bigger, wilder, and in every thrown-together-crew movie, there’s at least one loose-cannon.  Here, everyone is the straight man.  They could all be completely capable at their jobs and still be a little more charismatic.  Everyone takes it just a little too seriously, so the movie is absolutely missing a sense of fun. Honestly, I want it to get a sequel so that we can skip the team formation sequences and get to more schemes, fights, and missions.  I enjoyed it, but I wanted to love it, so I am left feeling disappointed.

6 out of 10