- 12A cert, 123 min. Dir: Simon Kinberg
It’s strange that Hollywood hasn’t yet touched the spotty but enticing story of Agent 355: a woman who daringly spied for the rebels during the American Revolution, and whose true identity was never revealed. Instead, her code name has been borrowed for the title of this female-led espionage thriller – perhaps to suggest the film owes a meaningful creative debt to something beyond the first couple of Mission: Impossible films.
Alas, it does not. Rather than doing anything novel or surprising with the basic spies-gone-rogue template, The 355 just repackages it in girl-power wrapping: it’s the film equivalent of a high-fructose, corn-syrup-based fizzy drink being passed off as chic in taller, slimmer cans.
When a deadly piece of technology emerges – in this case, a sort of magical iPod that can hack into any computer system on the planet, and also makes aeroplanes explode – it falls to a group of international female operatives to retrieve it, against the orders of their respective agencies. The leader of the gang is Mace (Jessica Chastain), an unflappable Ethan Hunt type from the CIA, whose professional partner and sometime lover Nick (Sebastian Stan) is apparently killed when the two are tracking the device in Paris.
Taking matters into her own hands, she tracks down an old MI6 ally, Lupita Nyong’o’s Q-like boffin Khadijah – and also forges a new alliance with Marie (Diane Kruger), a maverick operator from the German foreign intelligence service also tasked with bringing in the gadget. Graciela (Penélope Cruz), a translator from the Colombian National Intelligence Directorate who’s new to the sneaking and shooting stuff, is also drawn into the search – as, later, is Fan Bingbing’s Lin Mi Sheng, from the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
The script, by director Simon Kinberg and Theresa Rebeck, makes much of the fact that these women are ordinary (if highly trained) human beings, rather than bulletproof superheroes or glossy wish-fulfilment figures. “James Bond never had to deal with real life,” Chastain drily observes. But aside from a couple of convincingly crunchy scuffles involving Chastain, the action scenes are uninventive and clumsily shot, with little sense of real people being in real peril – just famous actresses and their body doubles going through the motions.
Equally, the exotic locations feel fuzzily gestured at rather than inhabited. Paris, Morocco and Shanghai all technically make appearances, but the local flavour extends only to “scene at pavement café”, or “chase through souk”, or “large neon sign outside window”.
