The 355 – Film Review

CIA agent Mason “Mace” Brown (Jessica Chastain) joins forces with a rival German agent, a cutting-edge computer specialist, and a Colombian psychologist when a top-secret weapon falls into the hands of a group of mercenaries. Together, the four women embark on a breakneck mission to save the world while staying one step ahead of a mysterious figure who’s tracking their every move.

Do you remember back when Simon Kinberg‘s The 355 was originally scheduled to be released in January of 2021 but was ultimately delayed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic? It was definitely disappointing for me when I heard the news, but I’m honestly not so sure why I was sad about the delay because The 355 is an incredibly bad movie and one that spends more than two hours middling around.

This is supposed to be an action film and yet there are an endless number of scenes that drag on and on and do absolutely nothing to propel the plot forward. You’ll probably end up like me while watching The 355 – sitting in a chair, hand on the side of your face as your eyes slowly sink in as you realize that you still have ninety minutes left to watch. No action movie should ever be this boring, but Kinberg has gone ahead and done it.

I’ve always been a huge defender of Kinberg’s previous film under director – Dark Phoenix – and I still stand by that film all these years later. Is it the best X-Men movie? No. Far from it. But to label it as one of the worst superhero movies ever made is just crazy to me. But Kinberg can definitely be hit or miss and sadly, this is one of the biggest misses in his career thus far. There are barely any redeeming qualities here.

For a film that focuses so heavily on its lead cast of mercenaries, you’d think that Kinberg and co-writer Theresa Rebeck would ensure that each protagonist is fleshed out and has enough things to do, but sadly, nearly every character in The 355 feels the same as the others. Why in the world does Chastain’s Mace Brown come across as the same character as Diane Kruger‘s Marie Schmidt for example?

Or perhaps an even better question – why did so many A-list actors want to partake in this project? There’s genuinely nothing enticing about it whatsoever. Heck, not even the rare few action sequences that we get in the movie are boring and sloppily filmed. It’s legitimately difficult for me to picture somebody such as Sebastian Stan reading through this script and thinking “Yeah, I want to be a part of this movie”.

Maybe the actors were blinded by certain things in the script. Maybe they took a read-through and thought the story sounded excellent on paper but it just simply didn’t translate well in an actual movie. Whatever the case may be, The 355 is unbearably bland and spends over two hours doing absolutely nothing. There is an embarrassing amount of exposition littered everywhere, characters are dishearteningly flat, and I just couldn’t help but feel as though all of these actors deserved so much better than this. Oh well. Maybe next time.