When Jessica Chastain announced at the Cannes that she would change the entire genre of ensemble action flicks by replacing male actors with females, she wasn’t joking, as evidenced with The 355. The quintet, Chastain, Penelope Cruz, Fan Bingbing, Lupita Nyong’o, and Diane Kruger have gone ahead and delivered on the promise with their new action movie- The 355, and the movie is all that we have been expecting from male ensemble action flicks over the decades.
The fault in the movie does not lie with the actors, but a simple, pedestrian script by director Theresa Rebeck and Simon Kinberg, which doesn’t do justice to the acting prowess of each of the actresses involved in this globetrotting spy adventure movie.
The 355 Is A New Wine In An Old Bottle
To put it simply, The 355 doesn’t really bring out any ground-breaking work in the genre of cinema, but it does deliver on the requisite fights and bad guys and chases that are the real essence of most action flicks. But it remains to be seen if men, the usual target audience for this type of entertainment, would be rushing to movie theatres to watch this movie.
There is no denying that The 355 is a project that has been designed from a completely well-worn recipe for these things- one that strictly aims at a global audience since the main stars are from all over the world and the locations of the movie ranges from Shanghai, to Morocco, to Paris, and several other exotic locations that one would associate with movies like Mission Impossible, James Bond, and Jason Bourne.
Interestingly, the main idea of The 355 came to Jessica Chastain and Fan Bingbing when they were jurors at the Cannes Film Festival back in 2017, and Chastain had noticed the tremendous cascade of posters with gun-toting men in action movies. This was where she decided that women also needed to get in on the action (no pun intended).
