With a cast as star-studded as The 355’s, it was one of many box office shocks in 2022 (including the runaway success of Top Gun: Maverick) that the film didn’t manage to attract more of an audience. Especially since 1) it was released during a slump month like January and 2) it seemed to be counting on a barrage of women to show up to the theater for it as a result of catering itself to “that set.” What’s more, despite a certain “feministic self-assurance,” the promo poster for The 355 still felt obliged to mention that the movie is “from the studio that brought you Jason Bourne.” Somewhat antithetical messaging when it comes to giving female spies the “vote of confidence” this movie wanted to. Because, clearly, they needed a more famous male spy’s “legitimacy” to convince viewers that these “lady spies” would be just as riveting to watch onscreen. And gee, it only takes five of them to equal one Jason Bourne. Or James Bond, for that matter.
So it is that, unfortunately, co-screenwriters Simon Kinberg (who also directed) and Theresa Rebeck (making quite a shift from some of her 00s fare like Catwoman and Gossip) end up doing quite the opposite of the ostensible intent of The 355 in their overwrought dialogue regarding female maltreatment in the spy industry and in general. The title of the film itself is an allusion to the chauvinism directed at women since time immemorial, especially in a field as male-dominated as espionage. Which is why the still-unknown identity of Agent 355 during the American Revolution holds so much power, particularly for agents in the CIA like Mason “Mace” Brown (Jessica Chastain). As someone who has sacrificed any and all personal relationships in favor of the job that is her entire life, her only “real friend” is fellow agent Nick Fowler (Sebastian Stan)—a telling last name as it turns out, for there’s definitely something foul and rotten in his state of double-crossing and two-timing. In fact, that’s what everyone seems to be doing after they catch wind of the existence of a decryption program that can essentially fuck with any digital system in the world.
Whether this ranges from someone’s personal computer to airplanes in the sky is at the user’s discretion—there’s no limit to the possibilities since literally everything we use is computerized (which is obviously why the next Dark Age would consist of a technology blackout). And, in this way, the twenty-first century has become decidedly flaccid for all its posturing about being “advanced.” For there is nothing “daring” or “exceptional” in spectrally attacking the world without any real traceability or accountability. That’s why the movie industry still favors “throwback spy movies” made in the present. Fare like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Atomic Blonde, both set during the Cold War.
However, The 355, like the Bond films, dares to set its world of espionage in the current era. One in which we’re no longer dealing in quaint illegal activities like drug trafficking but, rather, technology. In this way, the opening of the film is already riddled with Bondian precedents that land with a thud as the requisite betrayal occurs when “criminal mastermind” Elijah Clarke (Jason Flemyng) decides to shoot the sellers of the aforementioned decryption program instead of just paying them for the “goods.” To his ill-planned anticipation, various members of Colombia’s National Intelligence Directorate swoop in on the house, which is how Elijah ends up losing the drive to Luis Rojas (Édgar Ramírez), one of the DNI agents on the scene who can’t resist the temptation to “commit high treason” and sell it for his own gain. Or, as Nick says in one of many instances of overly expository dialogue, “He could have sold that thing for a lot more, but he just wants three mill for him and his family to disappear.”
So no, it doesn’t exactly seem as though Luis is someone who “loves” his work—not like Mace or another female spy that enters the fray, BND agent Marie Schmidt (Diane Kruger). A woman who is equally as dogged and determined in her agency pursuits as Mace, the implication being that, because neither one of them has a “special somebody” in their life, they turn the job into their true love. Which is why the viewer might think they would strike an immediate bond—were it not for the fact that they keep ruining the other’s covert op of the moment. Appropriately enough, the tagline for the movie is, “Work together or die alone.” A little warning that still manages to play into the ultimate fear the patriarchy likes to instill within women: that they’ll end up dying “alone” a.k.a. without a man to nag them until their final days. Even though a spy like James Bond is revered and idolized precisely because everyone knows he is going to “die alone” (or, as No Time to Die posits, he’s going to die because he forgot what a liability it is not to be alone). And that the great benefit of his job is all the foreign snatch he gets to sample. This is part of why Mace remarks, “James Bond never has to deal with real life.” Khadijah Adiyeme (Lupita Nyong’o), a former MI6 agent with a penchant for hacking, counters, “James Bond always ends up alone.” But that’s not actually a problem for a man, and Khadijah is clearly coming up with an answer based on her own clichély-drawn feminine perspective.
Because getting the branding of “badass” for being a lone wolf is hardly the usual light in which any female spy is presented, save for Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) in 2017’s Atomic Blonde. And even though she also tosses around spy banalities like, “I chose this life, and someday…it’s going to get me killed” (adding, for “tough bitch” measure, “But not today”), there is a lesser sense of “woe is me” or maladroitly-furnished sentiments regarding the specific challenges of being a woman, let alone a woman in a male-centric profession. To boot, in Atomic Blonde, the question of feminism is never brought up via overblown exchanges such as Mace telling DNI psychologist Graciela Rivera (Penelope Cruz), “I’m sorry that you’re here. This is my fault. I brought all of this into your life.” To which Graciela replies, “No you didn’t. He [Luis] did. You don’t have to apologize for him, Mace. We always do that, right? We think everything is our fault.”
Such moments of dialogue serve as one of many examples of derivative writing, borrowing from the already-dated “girlboss” rhetoric that has lately trickled down to t-shirts and mugs at Ross. But, considering the overall derivativeness of the movie, which leans into the tropes of the female spy genre just as another lesser Chastain offering, Ava, perhaps a viewer shouldn’t have expected much more. With regard to its all-around “echoic” qualities, the Bond imitation in particular comes across most notably when Mace explains to Khadijah, “You know those old wars? The Cold War, The War on Terror? We knew who we were fighting. But now the enemy’s invisible. Like ghosts in a machine.” It’s almost an exact rip-off of everything M (Judi Dench) was saying in Skyfall. Namely, “I’m frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They’re not nations… Our world is not more transparent now, it’s more opaque. It’s in the shadows. That’s where we must do battle. So, before you declare us irrelevant, ask yourselves: how safe do you feel?” What’s more, at least she had the grandiloquence to wield a Tennyson poem (“Ulysses”), which she recites as a conclusion to make her point to the committee about how the world needs her MI6 division more than ever: “We are not now that strength which in old days/Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;/One equal temper of heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
The female agents in The 355, on the contrary, must yield. That is, to each other. Something Khadijah reminds Mace and Marie of when she quotes the proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” She then emphasizes, “We have a common enemy.” In other words, none of them can be “the best” without being so as a collective. One they decide to call The 355 because, as Mace re-educates Nick about what they learned in “CIA school,” “Washington’s female spy. During the Revolution. Agent 355, that’s what they called her.” Nick mansplains, “Because they didn’t know her name.” Mace counters, “Someone knew her name, they just didn’t want the world to know it.” He continues to spell things out with, “You’re mad because I’m on the payroll and you’re on the run.” She confirms, “It’s not right, is it?” Nick shrugs, “The world’s not right, Mace.” Mace offers the equally trite platitude, “The world’s changing.” As we know, it’s really not, with each passing day a reminder of how the “women’s movement” continues to be set back with instances like the systematic overturning of Roe v. Wade and the public relishment of lambasting Amber Heard. The latter being a new talisman for men to hold up as the proverbial “castrating bitch,” one who might say with sarcasm, as Mace does, “Thanks for everything you taught me, Nick. A girl really does need a guy to explain it all to her.”
What might have worked better for The 355, in contrast to such moments, was greater subtlety, and less reliance on dialogue to convey the world’s network of misogyny that shines through in its network of spy and government agencies. Even another recent Sebastian Stan-featuring movie, Fresh, which is guilty of far more heavy-handedness in terms of presenting men as stifling, subjugating knaves, better succeeds precisely because its genre is rooted satire as opposed to the spy thriller. And, alas, at this juncture, the only satirical spy thriller featuring female agents (though not officially until the very end) is The Spy Who Dumped Me.
