By Thursday, The 355’s per-screen average had dumped to $91. Intrigued by its historic box office failure last weekend, I decided to give it a look Thursday. Could any movie with that kind of star power really be as bad as advertised?
Well, I will say this … I was never bored. At 122 minutes, The 355 is 20 minutes too long, but it clips along at a solid pace that keeps you from looking at your watch. Unfortunately, this was not true for the movie I saw immediately afterward, the dreadful Scream (2022).
The problem with The 355 is two-fold. First, although its production budget is estimated to be as high as $75 million, it unspools like a direct-to-video rip-off of the Mission: Impossible/Bourne franchises. The stakes, naturally, involve The End Of The World. The MacGuffin is a device that allows you to plug it into a laptop and crash planes, launch nukes, read anyone’s email, drain their bank accounts. There’s nothing it can’t do.
There’s also a lot of globe-trotting and foot chases, intricate heists and hand-to-hand combat, and a ticking clock. But it all feels so second and third tier, so very low rent.
The other problem is the script, which is full of lines like “Get some rest, you’re gonna need it” and “When you live a life of lies, it’s hard to know what’s true,” and “This could start World War III” and “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Then there are outright howlers like, “A girl really does need a guy to explain it all to her” and “You got beaten by a bunch of girls.”
Watch below:
Worst of all are all the logic leaps…
More than once, our heroines get their hands on the MacGuffin and don’t immediately destroy it, which allows the Bad Guys to retrieve it. Thanks for nothing, girls.
Oh, and at one point, even after they’ve had no problem killing innocent hostages, the Bad Guys just let our heroines go.
At one point, Chastain pulls a huge gun with an attached silencer out of her … sundress? She even carried extra mags with her.
The fight scenes are almost all ridiculous, especially a long one where Chastain bests a 240-pound bodyguard, a guy who could knock her flat with a slap.
Jessica Chastain plays Mace, a CIA operative who’s (naturally) gone rogue.
Lupita Nyong’o is a former MI6 agent. One last job.
Penelope Cruz is a psychologist for a Columbian spy agency and the character who makes the least amount of sense. Cruz is a legitimate talent and star, and how she’s wasted in this sad-sack role should be a felony.
Diane Krueger works for German intelligence.
Fan Bingbing is a Chinese operative who can do anything with hot water and herbs.
The honeys join forces and bond and save the world and don’t have much chemistry, and it’s all rather unexceptional.
What is exceptional is the man-hating. All the men in the movie are either villains or quiche-eating, stay-at-home cucks who take care of the kids, cook, and wait diligently for the little women to come home after a hard day of saving the world.
Why does Hollywood believe man-hating will sell?
In the real world, outside the Woketard Bubble, women actually like men. Most women have dads and brothers and boyfriends and husbands they appreciate, which means they’re put off by movies like The 355 that reduce the sex to villains and toxic boyfriends and pussies who make moon eyes on Skype and mewl things like, Be safe. Come home soon.
There are at least three shots of guys in the kitchen cooking, sometimes with a child in their arms.
And if men are so awful, why are feminists so eager to act like men? In The 355, the women do tons of guy stuff: save the world, fight, pull guns on each other, bond over bottles of beers, call each other “assholes,” wear the pants in the family… Apparently, we’re so awful the ladies want to be us.
You can see what attracted the actresses to The 355, the promise of a Big-Ass Franchise, a golden goose that would make them all fabulously wealthy and famous and iconic. Well, they only have themselves to blame for this embarrassing failure. The producers, which include Chastain and at least one other woman, were handed around $75 million to make that dream come true. But instead of holding out for an intelligent script (co-written by a woman) that would entertain everyone, they went Woketard…
Oh, I’m sure they will still blame the patriarchy for this failure. They’re probably sitting around in an uptight snit thinking, Men are too insecure to go see our movie!
Yeah, well, even feminists are avoiding it.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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