How US-China co-production The 355, starring Penélope Cruz, Jessica Chastain and Fan Bingbing, failed on all fronts
- With some of Hollywood’s hottest female names, as well as Chinese star Fan Bingbing, this spy film should have been a box-office smash
- However, with lacklustre set pieces, lame dialogue and cliched characters, The 355 failed to tick any boxes
The main victors were Universal Pictures and Huayi Brothers, who would look after American and Chinese distribution respectively.
The plot concerns a decryption device stolen by evil businessman Elijah Clarke (Jason Flemyng) which can access any digital system on earth.
CIA agents Mason “Mace” Brown (Chastain) and her partner/lover Nick Fowler (Sebastian Stan) head to Paris to retrieve it, but it’s stolen, Nick is killed, and Mace finds herself on the run.
She’s joined by German spy Marie Schmidt (Kruger), Colombian psychologist Graciela Rivera (Cruz) and English former agent Khadijah Adiyeme (Nyong’o). Together they track the device to Marrakech in Morocco, then Shanghai, where they encounter Chinese operative Lin Mi Sheng (Fan).
Was Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim really a show of Hollywood power?
Coming from the studio behind the Jason Bourne franchise, and with three Oscar winners in its cast, The 355 should have been a big hit, but it failed miserably on most counts. How much of this was bad luck and how much bad judgment is debatable.
There’s certainly plenty of the latter. The action set pieces are underwhelming; the dialogue is, in places, embarrassing – “How do you know my name?” asks Marie. “We’re spies, a****le!” replies Mace – and the whole enterprise feels seriously dated.
The decryption device is a shonky-looking hard drive with a red light on the top; much fuss is made about an important phone having “biometric fingerprinting”, when Touch ID was new to market back in 2013; and Cruz is warned to “Trust no one!” – the tagline of early 1990s TV show The X-Files.
The film also betrays its feminist credentials. We’re repeatedly reminded that, as women with boyfriends, husbands and children, these agents are always fighting on two fronts. In Mace’s words, “James Bond never had to deal with real life.”
But it often feels like they are defined only in relation to men. While Mace is training in the dojo, Nick tells her, “You fight like you date.” Marie has serious daddy issues. Graciela misses her husband and sons. Khadijah has a needy boyfriend. We’re even introduced to Lin’s father for all of 90 seconds.
Who knows what Rebeck’s original script was like, but the finished film seems to share Elijah’s incredulity about being “beaten by a bunch of girls”.
Just as ruinously, it also drops the ball when it comes to China. Fan doesn’t appear for the first hour; a lot of the Shanghai scenes seem to have been shot elsewhere; and her character is a cliché: an impassive assassin who has a deadly way with ancient herbs.
At least she gets to kick a** in the climactic showdown, the strongest sequence by far.
To be fair to the filmmakers, The 355 was also assailed by an extraordinary amount of bad luck, with Screen Daily calling it the “wrong film at the wrong time”.
Having already been pushed back by Covid, the film was almost derailed by Fan’s tax scandal, failing to secure a Chinese release at all.
To add insult to injury, it bombed at the American box office, making just US$14 million on an estimated budget of US$75 million. A dire 22 per cent Rotten Tomatoes score sealed its fate.
James Bond may have never had to deal with real life, but he never had to deal with any of this either.
