Movie Review: Jessica Chastain’s ‘The 355’

Picture: Picture Credit score: Robert Viglasky/Common Studios

No actor working at present is haunted by the Sturdy Feminine Character the way in which Jessica Chastain is haunted by the Sturdy Feminine Character. You recognize the sort — an aloof, hyper-competent exterior hiding some occasion of formative trauma, and no time for something so frivolous as romance except it results in betrayal or tragedy. To be a lady working as an actor is to interact in an ongoing, exhausting quest for materials that’s strongly written, or at the least not rife with lingering stereotypes. Chastain’s not exempt from that wrestle, however the extra energy she’s had over the elements she chooses, the extra she’s gravitated in direction of ones that, of their try and counter sexist clichés, have created an entire set of latest ones. The character she performs within the woman spy drama The 355, a challenge she proposed and produced, is a steely CIA agent who’s launched cheerfully beating up a colleague on the Langley health club when a brand new task arrives. Mace is a loner whose life revolves round her job and whose solely confidant is her associate and finest pal Nick (Sebastian Stan), who she falls into mattress with proper earlier than the supposedly straightforward operation they’re on goes improper and seems to depart him lifeless.

I’m making this sound extra dire than it really is. The 355 isn’t a complete catastrophe — how can it’s, when its solid contains Lupita Nyong’o as Khadijah, a tech-specialist who’s previously of MI6, and Penélope Cruz as Graciela, a psychologist working for Colombia’s DNI? However its dullness one way or the other feels worse than grand failure, as if its goals have been solely to show {that a} bunch of essentially the most well-known girls on earth can come collectively to make an motion movie simply as uninspired and boring as males can. The 355 was directed by X-Males: Darkish Phoenix’s Simon Kinberg, who wrote the script with Smash creator Theresa Rebeck, and he’s genuinely horrible with struggle sequences, which is an actual situation in a film that has a whole lot of them. Set items are chopped to barely legible bits in an effort to disguise stunt doubles, punches look blatantly pulled, it’s continuously unclear the place characters are in relation to at least one one other throughout chases, and one way or the other these globe-trotting badasses are all made to look awkward when carrying a gun.

Kinberg’s solely different directing credit score is for the aimless X-Males: Darkish Phoenix, by which Chastain performed the villain Vuk. His utter lack of any affinity for this type of materials speaks to the film’s conflicted goals. Regardless of pulling collectively a Fox Power 5-esque ensemble of worldwide stars — Diane Kruger and Fan Bingbing spherical out the worldwide ensemble as German BND member Marie and MSS agent Lin Mi Sheng — The 355 isn’t a stylized train reveling within the fabulousness of its solid. Other than some nifty fits on Nyong’o, there’s shockingly little of the sensory pleasure, a lot much less the enjoyable you’d get from a Bond film. The movie goals to be one thing nearer to Bourne, with its chase sequences on stolen motorbikes and an entire center sequence set in Morocco, however it has none of Paul Greengrass’s kinetic brilliance or, failing that, the choreography that’s made newer movies from David Leitch and Chad Stahelski so thrilling. The 355 is determinedly with out thrills, although as its characters chase a tech MacGuffin that may crash planes and produce down laptop programs, they do trudge by means of their respective bits of backstory as if it have been a chore to get out of the way in which.

Mace contends with the lack of the one individual in her life. Graciela frets about her husband and children again dwelling. Khadijah has a associate who really is aware of about her former life within the area. Marie (Kruger) has points surrounding the daddy she turned in herself as a traitor. And Lin Mi Sheng (Fan) is the type of personality-free embodiment of Chinese language energy that often will get popped into would-be blockbusters now regardless of feeling insulting to everybody concerned. The script contains hoary phrasing as if it’s required: “We will do it the simple manner, or we will do it the onerous manner,” Mace tells a suspect earlier than she and the opposite girls interrogate and torture him. “That’s the factor with companions — they get killed, or they kill you,” Marie intones throughout a lull within the non-action. None of that is as painful because the coda, when the movie leans into the girlbossery that it beforehand largely skirted, with Mace declaring to a foe that the id of Agent 355, the feminine spy who labored for George Washington in the course of the American Revolution, stays unknown as a result of “somebody knew her identify, they simply didn’t need the world to comprehend it.” The 355 is, finally, a film about how girls are underappreciated of their roles of utilizing violence to prop up their respective states, and its climax finds Mace triumphantly sending somebody off to a black website after besting him by ingesting her liquor straight. She’s not like the opposite ladies, you see? Yaasss.