{"id":51925,"date":"2022-01-10T15:02:21","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T20:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=51925"},"modified":"2022-01-10T15:29:27","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T20:29:27","slug":"the-355-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2022\/01\/the-355-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The 355 \u2013 Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                For some reason, \u201cThe 355\u201d really wanted to be the first movie of the year \u2013 any year. It was originally scheduled to open in January 2021, but I guess the studio decided that since theaters in major markets weren\u2019t open yet, it should be pushed back to January 2022. Things might have worked out better in 2021. Yes, it would have faced obvious hurdles with a limited number of theaters, but competition in that era was scarce. It wouldn\u2019t have gotten steamrolled by \u201cSpider-Man: No Way Home\u201d and \u201cSing 2\u201d like it did this past weekend when it opened to less than $5 million at the domestic box office. Then again, it might not have made a difference. Audiences know a bomb when they see one, no matter when it opens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

                The film brings together an impressive cast: Academy Award winner Penelope Cruz, Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong\u2019o, multiple time Academy Award nominee Jessica Chastain, SAG Award winner Diane Kruger, and Chinese superstar Bingbing Fan. A movie like this should want you to come for who these actresses are and stay for what they do. Unfortunately this movie is just content to get you to come for who the actresses are and that\u2019s it, there\u2019s nothing interesting about what they do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                The actresses play spies (actually Cruz plays a psychologist who works for a spy agency but isn\u2019t a spy herself, as her wet-blanket character constantly reminds us) that are all trying to keep an evil flash drive from falling into the wrong hands. The \u201cwrong hands\u201d means the bad guys, obviously, but it also means each other\u2019s agencies, meaning that they\u2019re at odds with one another. Eventually they learn to work together and rightfully decide that their own corrupt agencies shouldn\u2019t have it either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                Their mission takes them all over the world as they track the MacGuffin from one boring bald guy to another. We wait for it to wind up in the hands of a cast member worth crediting. It starts off with a corrupt DNI agent (Edgar Ramirez), but he\u2019s got \u201ckilled off quickly\u201d written all over him. We also know that arms dealer Clarke (Jason Flemyng) is in the mix, but he\u2019s too boring (even for this movie) to truly be at the top. Could it possibly be Chastain\u2019s partner (Sebastian Stan), who was presumably killed in the first act, but whose death we didn\u2019t see so he\u2019s surely still out there somewhere?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                The characters and story certainly aren\u2019t enough to carry this movie, how\u2019s the action? Choppy and underwhelming. The actresses usually wear wigs for their missions, which is just a thinly-veiled excuse to hide stunt doubles under those wigs. But the stunt doubles aren\u2019t being directed particularly well, so there\u2019s little point. The fight scenes offer nothing unique and there are so many shootouts that you\u2019ll be bored with shooting by the end of this movie. A movie with this high of a body count from shooting really has no business going for a PG-13 rating, but it\u2019s intentionally just bloodless enough to qualify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                Although the film\u2019s advertising has given away why the movie is called \u201cThe 355,\u201d we don\u2019t get the scene where it\u2019s explained until the very end (which is another dead giveaway that the Stan character is still alive). This means that the group plans to continue working together, and thus a sequel is implied. I dare someone to give us a sequel after how bad this movie is and how badly it has performed. At least whoever is put in charge won\u2019t have to worry about high expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grade: D<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe 355\u201d is rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, brief strong language, and suggestive material. Its running time is 124 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver                 For some reason, \u201cThe 355\u201d really wanted to be the first movie of the year \u2013 any year. It was originally scheduled to open in January… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":51926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[1012],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51925"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51925"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51930,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51925\/revisions\/51930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}