The 355 (2022)

The 355 arrives with its thesis printed on the label. Jessica Chastain, weary of watching men save the world in tuxedos, proposed a spy thriller in which the tuxedos would be distributed more equitably across five agencies and four continents. What she got is a film that treats its own casting as the plot. An American, a Brit, a German, a Colombian, and a Chinese agent bicker and bond through Paris, Morocco, and Shanghai, and the screenplay never quite catches up to the press release. The title nods to a real female spy of the American Revolution, though the film has no interest in history beyond the borrowed name.

The film's social ambitions are demographic before they are thematic. Race is present as a cast list and never as a subject. Nobody comments on it, nobody wrestles with it, and the cross-national alliance is offered as a tidy symbol of cooperation. There is no queer content, no environmental anxiety, no body-positivity messaging, no neurodivergent character. The villains are black-market arms dealers, which allows for a faint shrug toward institutional rot and nothing resembling an economic argument. Even the film's own diversity drew fire, since a Spanish actress was cast as a Colombian psychologist and the defense offered was something about a common international thread.

The messaging sits in the premise instead of the dialogue, which spares us the sermon and leaves us with the casting. Critics called it box ticking, and the accusation lands. The film wants credit for assembling the team and seems to believe the assembly is the achievement. It is not a bad idea executed with conviction. It is a good idea executed with a spreadsheet. The whole enterprise lost a reported ninety-three million dollars, which is the market's blunt review of conceptual progress delivered without a story to carry it. We are left with a competent, exhausted espionage picture and a lesson about packaging.