Fan Binbing

(On Cable TV, May 2022) My muted reaction to many gender-flipped movie projects isn’t so much about reactionary tendencies than disappointment at the laziness of many such flips. Or the weird celebration of ideas that were terrible when played by males in the first place. It really doesn’t help when such projects come with a breathless self-celebration of their progressive credentials, conveniently forgetting decades of prior examples. So, when writer-director Simon Kinberg’s the 355 comes complete with auto-congratulatory back-patting as a female version of espionage thrillers, it comes across as more than a little obnoxious… especially considering that the film itself is not particularly impressive. (Also, not to put too much of a fine point on it: Kinberg’s career as a writer-director is no shining beacon of excellence. His work as a producer is not all bad, though.)  There are a few decent ideas floating around the project – celebrating teamwork rather than hermetic individuality, spending some time thinking about the domestic challenges of being a working spy, Jessica Chastain in a role fully playing to her screen persona. There’s even, to be charitable, one good sequence set in a Moroccan city. The cast is also quite promising: Chastain is joined by such notables as Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o and Fan Binbing (whose English seems notably worse here than in previous films). But the rest of the 355 is not distinctive enough to be remarkable – tired tropes, indifferent characters, very familiar punching bags (are you surprised than most of the male characters are evil or victims? Mostly evil, though.), terrible dialogue and bland directing all combine to make this a deeply unimpressive genre entry. While the 355 is hardly unusual in going for a fantasy depiction of espionage – expect the characters to band together to save the world from an international criminal rather than being anything like a nuanced look at real espionage—it seems unwilling to go beyond the clichés. This is probably the third or fourth film I’ve seen in the past year where the MacGuffin is a magical high-tech device that can bring down planes, electrical devices and governments, and I’m tired of it. In manipulating the elements of espionage fiction, the 355 doesn’t do much more than the usual, and so makes a very poor case about how it’s different (let alone better) from so many other dull thrillers. The gender-flipping also becomes noticeably more insistent in its third act, calling further attention to its limitations. I want strong, competent female protagonists and I want to question the crudest assumptions of genre cinema, but a disappointing movie that loudly calls itself progressive only makes things worse for everyone.