The 355 – Film Review

The 355

GPA: 1.1/4.0

A CIA agent teams up with four other women (from Great Britain, Germany, Columbia, and China each) reluctantly have to team up against some bad guys that plan to start WWIII.

Simon Kinberg co-wrote the screenplay and directed this movie, and was his second feature film since Dark Phoenix.  I didn’t dislike Dark Phoenix as much as many other reviewers did, but I still found it to be a mediocre superhero flick.  Even though it came out on the first Friday of January this year, I was still hopeful that it was going to be a fun action movie with a stellar cast.  It was originally going to come out on January 15 last year but was delayed to January 14 this year thanks to COVID-19.  Later, it got moved up to January 7, and I watched it.  It’s terrible.

The Action Sequences:

The action sequences, for the most part, were of very poor quality.  There were a few set-pieces that were passable, but most of them consisted of the awful shaky cam (and sometimes handheld cam) work that people generally don’t care for and slipshod quick-cut editing.  The best way to describe most of the camera work was disorienting.  The editing was terrible, and the most shocking part was that Lee Smith (yes, the same Lee Smith that edited The Dark Knight movies and Dunkirk) co-edited this movie with John Gilbert (who edited The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Hacksaw Ridge).  The movie had talented cast members along with stunt workers that can make fight scenes look believable, so there were honestly no excuses for the action scenes being this terrible.  The jarring cinematography and editing decisions were more than likely choices made by the director and/or the producers instead of the editors and cinematographer.

The Story Didn’t Work:

The story was written by Theresa Rebeck while the screenplay was written by Rebeck herself and Simon Kinberg.  The story left so much room to be desired, and it was a challenge to care about it since many aspects of it barely made any sense.  Besides the story being occasionally hard to follow, there was a plot twist that was so predictable that I saw it coming from a mile away in the first fifteen minutes or so.  It was also a pedestrian and boring movie, and Simon Kinberg’s direction could have been better.

Tom Holkenborg’s Music Score wasn’t One of his Best:

Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL) is a very talented music composer, but this movie didn’t have one of his best music scores.  It’s also more forgettable than most of his other music compositions.  It’s a serviceable music score, but it sounded like other pieces of music from previous movies.  I appreciated that he tried to create a different style of music for this film, but it barely sounded like his best scores.

It had a Great Cast:

Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Fan Bingbing, Lupita Nyong’o, Sebastian Stan, Édgar Ramírez, Jason Flemyng, and other (smaller-named) cast members were all in this movie.  The main leads are mostly very big-named actors/actresses.  The performances were acceptable, and they all did their best with lackluster characters (the villains were terrible).  The chemistry between the five women was very strong, and this was the film’s biggest strength.  As the movie progressed, the movie did a solid job at making them feel like they’re a team.  This honestly held the movie together, and if the chemistry wasn’t great, it would have crumbled into pieces.

Awful Pacing and Wasted Potential:

This movie was about 2 hours and 4 minutes long including credits, and it wasn’t very hard to feel the runtime from start to finish.  Despite a slower pace for the first half, it dragged considerably more by the latter half.  Part of this had to do with this being a dull motion picture, and the other part was its weak story.  There was no natural flow and it was honestly a drag to sit through.  The movie was ultimately one that was filled with missed opportunities.  This could have been a genuinely solid and fun female-led action flick that was released in January.  What we got instead was a boring and poorly-paced mess that had terrible action sequences and a story that was hard for me to get invested in.

So, I clearly didn’t care for The 355, but if you do want to check it out (I would still check it out for yourself if you still want to see it), I’m interested in hearing your opinion on it.  If this movie didn’t interest you from the beginning, then I wouldn’t recommend checking it out since it won’t likely exceed your expectations (despite a great cast).

I saw it in theaters.

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Sensory Friendly Update:

If anyone cares about this movie, there will be sensory friendly showings at select AMC Theatres on January 12, 2022.  This review is not sponsored by AMC Theatres.