January releases don’t exactly have the best track record. The first month of the year is often reserved for movies that studios don’t have a lot of confidence in, maybe are smaller with no star power, among other reasons. Of course, not every movie released this time of year is a complete dud (fingers crossed Scream will be one of those exceptions), but there seem to be far fewer winners than losers most of the time.
On paper, The 355 doesn’t profile as your typical January dump. An action spy thriller starring Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Diane Kruger, Penelope Cruz, Fan Bingbing, and Sebastian Stan? That sounds like an easy winner, right? Something more fit for a spring or summer release. So the fact that it got relegated to the first weekend of the new year didn’t give me high hopes for this one. But maybe that ended up helping. It’s by no means great, but with such low expectations, I was able to at least have fun with it, flawed as it may be.
The biggest issue with The 355 is how simple, generic, and cliched it is. International government agents have to prevent a bad device (“the drive”) from falling into the hands of the bad guys who want to use it to do bad things. Not exactly going too deep on the story here. Here, the spys are represented by five different countries: Mace Brown (Chastain) from America, Khadijah Adiyeme (Nyong’o) from the UK, Marie Schmidt (Kruger) of Germany, Columbian psychologist Graciela Rivera (Cruz), and China’s Lin Mi Sheng (Fan). They all – except for Fan, who the movie stupidly decides to keep hidden until the second half – have their own generic, seen-it-a-thousand-times backstory that makes their team-up unlikely. But they have to overcome their differences in order to save the world.
As boring as that all is, it’s still possible to overcome. A good villain would help. But The 355 fails miserably there. There’s not even a specific evil plan they’re trying to stop. The movie’s big bad just wants the drive so he can sell it himself at an auction with other, unnamed bad guys. What about the script? Nope. Clunky dialogue and full of exposition, fully favoring telling over showing. The story also delves deep into “the bad guys are idiots” toolbox. They make so many mistakes and decisions that any semi-competent villain would have easily “won”the movie. There’s one moment that is particularly egregious, though I won’t go into details here, as it comes near the end of the movie.
What about the twists? It’s a spy movie after all, there have to be twists. Anything good there? Nope, sorry. Not that there aren’t twists. It’s just that they’re painfully obvious, and only really work as twists if this is the first movie you’ve ever seen. And if that happens to be the case, great! Your mind will be blown a couple times! But save for that unlikely scenario, you’ll see everything coming from miles away. So where does that “fun” I mentioned earlier come into play?
The action is part of it. It’s overly reliant on shaky cam and highly edited sequences, but I still enjoyed most of it. But really, anything good comes down to one thing: the cast. What a cast! There is legit, massive star power here, and they are doing everything they can to elevate this movie. They’re able to make corny lines sound less corny, contrived storylines feel less contrived. And for me, that’s enough to give The 355 a pass. Not everyone will get the same mileage out of the performances here, and that’s more than fair. But for an early January release, you could do a lot worse.
Score: 65/100
