The 355 is about a team of female agents, each from a different country’s intelligence agency, working together (eventually) to retrieve the most McGuffiny of McGuffins. A doohickey that lets baddies hack anything… cause planes to explode mid-air, shut down power grids, steal plot ideas from better spy thriller scripts, etc. Can these hostile ladies work together to save the world? Probably.

The flick is two hours long and that’s entirely too many hours… and it takes a whole thirty minutes to get the team together. And the effort is… ok. This movie is ok. Mostly ok, maybe. I mean, I’ve seen the latest Charlie’s Angels and that was bad. This is ok. I mean, it’s better than a stick in the eye, right?

The dialog is hackneyed and cliched, the music the most generic suspense tunes imaginable, and the action is a little shaky-cam. These female spies are also really bad at their jobs… they spend the whole movie playing hot potato with the McGuffin, constantly chasing it, losing it, chasing it, and losing it. But, my Mr. Brightside says, at least they aren’t Mary Sues. Mary Sue wouldn’t miss all her shots, get fooled by the most obvious heal turn in movie history, get captured multiple times, etc.

But the movie isn’t unwatchable. It has slight doses of good action and spy shenanigans. The actress are all pretty solid… we’re talking Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz, Diane Kruger, and Lupita Nyong’o (and eventually Fan Bingbing). They do credible work in most of the action scenes (when the editing allows you to see ’em work) and have a tiny handful of character development scenes they try real hard at making us interested in (spoiler alert: doesn’t really work but at least they tried?)

Anyhow, see it when it comes out on streaming? Or not… depends on how much you like these actresses and can handle some generic but not terrible spy thriller cruft. I’ve seen worse. Shrugs all around.

Score: 72