Few action films have ever crowded this much talent into a single frame. The 355 drops Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger and Fan Bingbing into the same espionage thriller — five actresses with Oscars, nominations and real star power between them — and then asks remarkably little of any of them. The result is the rare blockbuster that feels less directed than assembled, built from a marketing whiteboard rather than a script.

Directed by Simon Kinberg from a screenplay he wrote with Theresa Rebeck, the film follows a CIA operative (Chastain) who reluctantly joins forces with a German agent (Kruger), a former MI6 cyber specialist (Nyong’o), a Colombian psychologist (Cruz) and a guarded Chinese operative (Fan Bingbing) to recover a decryption drive that can crack any system on Earth. They name themselves “355,” after the codename of the first female spy of the American Revolution. The plot globe-hops from Paris to Marrakech to Shanghai, ticking every spy-movie box without ever discovering why we should care.

All concept, no execution

Kinberg, a prolific producer making only his second turn behind the camera, stages the set pieces with competence and no signature. The beats arrive on schedule — a market chase, a rooftop scramble, a black-tie auction-house infiltration — but they’re shot and cut like every other mid-budget thriller of the streaming era, all motion and no tension. The screenplay keeps pausing to explain its own title and to reshuffle alliances that never feel earned. For a film about the world’s sharpest operatives, it is curiously reluctant to let them be clever.

Five stars in search of a movie

What keeps the thing watchable is the cast, working well below its ceiling and still lifting the material by sheer professionalism. Chastain, who also produced and originated the project, brings a flinty conviction the script never rewards; Nyong’o finds wit in a thinly drawn hacker; Kruger and Cruz strike up a brief, welcome odd-couple chemistry. Fan Bingbing arrives late and underused. You spend the runtime imagining the sharper film these five could have made with a director who had something to say.

The 355 wanted to launch a franchise — a female-fronted answer to the boys’-club spy series — and instead became a cautionary tale about concept over execution. Audiences stayed home, critics shrugged, and a genuinely good idea was spent on a generic product. It isn’t offensively bad; for a film this stacked it’s something worse: forgettable. The talent on screen deserved the spy thriller this never bothers to be.

Cast & Crew

Director: Simon Kinberg. Screenplay: Simon Kinberg, Theresa Rebeck. Cast: Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Fan Bingbing, Sebastian Stan, Édgar Ramírez. United States, 2022. 122 minutes.