'The 355' - Movie Review

This movie appears to be the product of actress Jessica Chastain and director Simon Kinberg, who worked together on the equally bad "Dark Phoenix." This time we have an international crew of female government agents who don't like each other but have to work together to take down a nasty ring of terrorists determined to cause world-wide catastrophe. The rest of the plot is equally unoriginal.

I had trouble suspending disbelief right from the beginning. The son of a Colombian drug lord has somehow created a technological MacGuffin that can enter any encrypted computer system. I work with computers: there are many ways to hack many of them. But according to this, this product could crack ALL of them. So ... that's total bullshit. And shortly after that, we have a chase sequence in which Chastain leaps up on a bunch of café tables, and then while running full out without looking down at all, she shoots the cord of a hanging lamp so it falls from the ceiling to block the path of the person she's chasing. The movie has now shown a technical impossibility followed by a physical impossibility, and yet I continued to watch ... Chastain's character later expended entire clips of ammo shooting at a guy who wasn't very far from her without ever hitting him ... but she could hit a lamp cord while running full tilt over a broken surface? Conveniently inconsistent.

The action sequences are well constructed and filmed ... although it's clear in the fights that Chastain is no martial artist, and that physics wasn't a concern. Little else can be said for this movie.