122 min | PG-13 | January 7, 2022 | Universal Pictures
The 355 sends a CIA agent to assemble a team of international spies and recover a weapon that can crash the world. Five of the best actresses alive sign on. The movie forgot to give them a movie.
The 355 gathers intelligence agents from five countries to recover a digital weapon that can crash any system on earth. Mace Brown is a CIA operative who loses the device on a botched handoff and spends the rest of the film chasing it across Paris, Marrakech, and Shanghai. The plot is a delivery system for star power. Five accomplished actresses share the frame and the film treats that fact as its reason to exist. The real subject is the belief that a famous cast can paper over a script with nothing underneath it.
Jessica Chastain plays Mace with clenched intensity and little else to do. She runs, fights, and broods, and the character never develops past her competence. Lupita Nyong’o plays Khadijah Adiyeme, a computer specialist, and brings a warmth the script does not earn. Penélope Cruz plays Graciela Rivera, a Colombian psychologist pulled into the field, and her panic is the most human thing in the film. Diane Kruger plays Marie Schmidt, a German agent written as Mace’s rival, and the two trade hostility that never deepens into anything. Fan Bingbing plays Lin Mi Sheng, and the film holds her at arm’s length until a late reveal that arrives too cheaply to matter.
Simon Kinberg directs from a script he wrote with Theresa Rebeck. He stages the action with a restless handheld camera that chops every fight into fragments. The geography of each set piece dissolves into close-ups and quick cuts. The audience never sees a punch land in a frame that holds long enough to register. The globe-trotting structure promises spectacle and delivers a montage of establishing shots and airport lounges. The score pushes tension that the editing refuses to build.
The 355 wants to be a franchise launch and behaves like one before it earns the right. It assembles a cast that could carry a sharp thriller and hands them a plot stitched together from older, better films. Every twist arrives on schedule and lands without weight. The women deserve roles with interior lives instead of assignments. This is a competent imitation of a spy movie that mistakes its cast for a reason to care.