The Oscar nominee leads an impressive cast in a frustratingly rote caper that ends up being as forgettable as its title
While X-Men scribe Simon Kinberg’s junky action thriller chooses not to reveal the meaning behind its truly forgettable title until the end (one of his many bizarre decisions as writer-director), I’m going to start by explaining that The 355 is a reference to Agent 355, one of America’s first female spies, deployed during the late 18th century, real identity forever unknown. Perhaps the reason we find this out so very late is that a mere whiff of this story ends up being far more dramatically enticing than the film it’s inspired, the first big release of the year doubling up as its first big disappointment.
Back in 2017, while in the middle of
shooting another ill-advised disaster – the loathed X-Men spin-off Dark Phoenix – Jessica Chastain approached Kinberg about creating a female-led action thriller in the vein of
James Bond and Mission: Impossible. By the following summer, the film was presented to buyers at Cannes by Chastain and co-stars, an appealingly commercial package that was unsurprisingly snapped up fast. Almost four years later, after a delayed release as a result of Covid, whatever might have worked on paper fizzles out on screen, a gussied-up pile of schlock that wastes a cast who deserve so much better. Rather than being worthy of the collective might of Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger and Bingbing Fan, it feels like the kind of bottom shelf dross that Bruce Willis and Jesse Metcalfe would sleepwalk through to pay the bills, piles of cash handed over via grubby manilla envelopes.