The 355

Mission Inevitable

The 355
USA/China 2022
Directed by Simon Kinberg
Universal Pictures

Warning: Spoilers.

Well, they’ve been promising a female version of The Expendables, in terms of a powerhouse female action movie for some time now but never came through and so it was inevitable that something would pop up to fill that void and, this year’s attempt at that vacancy so far is The 355. Originally it was shot in a different form with some slightly changed characters as a TV pilot for a series that was never picked up (and I assume the pilot was never shown?). But now it’s a big budget movie and it’s got a stellar cast of credible looking, very smart actresses to take on the roles of the five main heroines of the movie...

There’s US secret agent lady Mace, played by the always brilliant Jessica Chastain. Her former opponent (from the early parts of the movie), German agent Marie, played by the wonderful Diane Kruger. There’s Mace’s friend in British intelligence, cyber expert Khadijah, played in a wonderfully British upper middle class way by Lupita Nyong'o. There’s ‘getting caught up in something she doesn’t belong in’ Spanish psychiatrist Graciela, played by the legendary Penélope Cruz and, finally, there’s ‘is she an enemy or is she an ally?’ agent Lin, played by Bingbing Fan.

So, five powerhouse actresses who, for the most part, seem a little wasted in likeable roles, to be honest, in a fairly entertaining... if unsurprising... film. Yeah, about that...

While I enjoyed the movie just fine, it’s very formulaic... like a lot of stuff coming out of Hollywood these days. It doesn’t matter, in a way, that the actresses are all so good in their roles because, frankly, there are two elements here which hamstring the movie quite badly.

One is the script.

One character played by Sebastian Stan, Mace’s partner, gets killed off very early in the movie. It happens off screen and a body is not shown. So, yeah, if you believe that character’s just left the movie, well... you’ve not seen many movies. Secondly, because Mace’s boss tells her that he’d died... if you go with your gut and assume the former character is not dead, you’ll know how credible an ally her boss is so, again, when he’s killed by ‘enemy presence’ Lin, it also kind of points to her really being one of the ‘good gals’ all along. So, unfortunately, it’s a film which has ‘reveals’ that unravel very quickly before they’re even declared, as each is set up like a little row of Matryoshka dolls unmasking the whole plot development before the movie has even properly started. So in terms of surprises... nothing to see here folks, move along.

The other thing that disappoints is that it feels like it’s an 18 rated movie that’s been gutted like a fish to bring it down to an age rating where kids can go and see it. Take just the fight scene elements, for example... they’re filmed in a vicious, brutal, hard hitting manner but you never really see any hard hitting gore or, for example, bullet shots to the head or body squibs etc... nor any stabbing highlighted. It’s like a 1970s Marvel comic in that respect and... I’ve got nothing against that for sure, I like that stuff... but this feels like the wrong venue to be playing those kind of ‘softening games’ considering the cold war backdrop of a group of rogue agents trying to obtain a hard drive which would mean the end of everything, if in the wrong hands, very quickly. The film is trying to be a cold war, secret agent movie but it feels like it keeps pulling its punches. My guess is, it was filmed as something with a higher rating and then cut down by the studio to reduce the likelihood of actually getting that rating. The same with the lack of nudity and intimacy in the one sex scene too... the tone felt off. Now, I may be wrong in what’s happened at final cut here but, heck, that’s what it feels like and that element of it didn’t do the film any favours, in my estimation.

But, regardless, the film does have the five lead actresses as it’s ace in the hole. All of them look like they could do what they are doing and it lends the movie an air of credibility it may have found tough achieving with some lesser artists in the roles. The cinematography and editing is also nicely done. Nothing too interesting in terms of shot design but I did like the subtle shifts in the colour palette between certain sections of the film, at it least subtle but most gorgeous when the girls turn up in Morocco and everything turns into whites with washed out yellows, browns and oranges. Nice stuff. And the editing didn’t get in the way of things really... just softened it a little due to, what I suspect, were deliberate omissions to that all important final cut. You certainly knew where you were in a fire fight though and it brings a certain clarity to the combat scenes where, again, a lot of modern Hollywood movies just bring confusion.

More confusing are such unanswered questions such as, how can Khadijah set the girls up with special spy equipment half way through the movie when they have no resources and are all on the run? Or, how can Khadijah’s boyfriend know it’s her calling him on the phone when we’ve already seen her smash up her phone so it can’t be traced earlier in the movie, so she surely wouldn’t have the same number?

So, all said and done, The 355 is an entertaining action movie and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes those things, with the caveat that the audience will see everything coming long before it actually is revealed in the story. There’s a nicely sinister and ruthless villain portrayed rather well by Jason Flemyng who is kinda wasted and thrown away at the end so, yeah, that doesn’t really help the movie either but he turns in a strong performance here, so there’s that. All in all, a nice looking film but, if you really want to see an absolutely amazing female action movie, then maybe you should steer yourself towards last year’s excellent Gunpowder Milkshake (reviewed here), which is far more innovative, surprising and much more interesting than this one. But, The 355 is an okay action movie and better than many cranked out these days, for sure. 

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story

Hedy’s Hoppers

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story
USA 2017
Directed by Alexandra Dean

Just a brief note of a review to give some praise to this film, which had a short theatrical release last year in the UK. Written and directed by Alexandra Dean, Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is a kind of love letter of a documentary to the once famous Hollywood star and is a culmination, it seems to me, of various people trying to redress the balance of a life once lived where a person's beauty and public personae was a blindfold to the true genius of the individual in question. It also reveals how the US government, it seems, cheated that star out of both reward and recognition for something which was secretly put to good use and which, when one looks at the benefits of just one of her achievements, has been a boon to mankind since the lady in question first put her mind to it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a little.

This documentary starts at her beginning, shortly after Hedy’s birth as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 and highlights the things which helped shape her personality... such as her inventiveness being due to her admiration for her father, who meant a great deal to her. Also, it mentions her experimentation with the effects of her beauty on people and her frequent visits to a local photographer to take various shots of her... many of them ‘arty’ in nature (and by arty, perhaps I also mean revealing). Then the determined pitch to be in movies in her own country which, of course, built up to her infamous nudity and orgasm scenes in Ekstase (1933).

The film also documents her various marriages including her first, to a prince, which was so stifling that she eventually slipped a sleeping draft into one of the maid’s drinks, swiped her clothes and rode off into the night on her bike to avoid discovery as she exited that marriage and then tried to get into motion pictures... at first turning down Louis B. Mayer of MGM’s offer before then hopping onto his ship going back to Hollywood (along with a load of cheaply signed starlets going with him) and ensuring she got herself noticed enough by him that she could almost name any deal she wanted. The film also documents her decline in later years, as the hardworking Hollywood ethos of drugs to keep you awake and then make you sleep, such as what was being done to many of the workers to keep them going (famously, even child actors like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney), took their toll on her personality and her status as a single mother in the 1940s. Not an easy life to live.

And, of course, the film also makes much of her brilliant invention, co-created with composer George Antheil, where she came up with the idea of frequency hopping to stabilise the course of guided torpedos and stop them from being jammed. The military turned the patent down but evidence has since come to light that they were using these ideas on their stuff all the time and, when it was later followed up to get the patent back from the Navy, the word came through that it belonged to them and they could do what they liked with it because, technically, Lamarr was an ‘alien’. This shocking attitude towards somebody who was, by this point, a lady and patriot of America. Someone who had sold unbelievable millions of dollars in war bonds for the American government due to her appearances (something which a lot of movie stars were doing at the time).

The film is presented to us by various people giving commentaries... a few of them famous movie personalities themselves such as Diane Kruger and Mel Brooks. However, the majority of the interview clips are from relations of the lady, such as her son who the film focuses on quite a bit and, surprisingly for a film of this type, from the lady herself as a reporter, who is also in the film a lot, has unearthed a lost, taped interview he conducted with Hedy many decades before and which is used as a complement to the voice-over narrative on the film. So you do hear a lot of her, ‘in her own words’, so to speak, looking back over her life.

The film is pretty interesting and just about varied enough in its execution and enthusiasm not to get dull and to hold the interest throughout. Much is obviously made of her unique invention of ‘frequency hopping’, which is used as the basis for mobile phone technology, bluetooth, satellite navigation etc and all that stuff is really interesting. All that being said, though, we don’t get to hear about many of her other inventions throughout the documentary and I really wanted to know more... although I think the cooling cube which she thought of as a failure due to information she was unaware of about the difference in water between various states, was a pretty cool idea. I mean, she was so often coming up with stuff that her friend Howard Hughes set her up with a miniature version of his own laboratory when she thought up the concept of swept back wings to help make his planes go faster, after doing a bit of research on fish and birds (which is deftly illustrated in this film)... so it would be really nice to see what else she was dreaming up.

Jeremy Bullock and Keegan DeWitt’s score is a little like the music of Philip Glass in its approach and that’s not a bad thing... but everybody seems to be trying to sound like Glass or sometimes Nyman in their documentary movies these days and it seems a shame that this is the only kind of score we are getting for these kinds of things at the moment. That being said, you can’t fault it and I would have quickly plonked down the money for a CD of this thing, had one been available.

Well, I said this was a short review and I wasn’t lying. Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is extremely entertaining and informative, at least to the point where it whets your appetite and makes you want to go and read one of the books currently available about the lady. On the surface it would seem that this is not the most likely subject for a documentary movie but, once you step back and think about the import of Ms. Lamarr’s contribution and her legacy to the world we live in, it does make you stop and think how long it would have taken for somebody else to come up with the idea. Definitely worth a watch as this lady’s story deserves to be better known. 

Liam Nesia

Unknown 2011

UK/Germany/

France/Canada/

Japan/USA

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Now playing

at UK cinemas.

Warning! Spoilers? Oh yes, big ones. Not really spoilers as such if you’ve seen the trailer because... well, you’ll see. If you really want to know nothing more than you can already figure out from the trailer then stay away from reading any of this review.

Hmmm... I remember watching the trailer for this movie at the cinema and as the first thought popped into my head “Woah... they’ve done another Taken or, at the very least, a new Taken rip-off”... the rest of the trailer played out and that rather hopeful thought process had unfortunately changed to... “Blimey, that’s an old plot they’re digging up again. Have people really never seen this hook before?” Still, regardless of the old 1940s-nobody-remembers-who-I-am-not-even-my-wife plot line, it did still look like it was trying to mine the same vein of “thrillcium” that Taken had opened up and, since I’d really liked that movie... there was no way I was wanting to miss this movie at the cinema.

Besides, I’d already seen Rango earlier that day and was singularly unimpressed... so I figured a big, shouty-jumpy-punchy action movie with lots of pulse-pounding percussion effects could not even begin to disappoint me... how wrong I was.

Unknown, it turns out, is a classic case of a movie trailer giving you all the answers you need to work out, within the first few minutes of the film, that movie’s final solution. You know, from the trailer, that there’s a twist... the trailer shows you Liam Neeson having an accident, not remembering stuff and then, when he does remember who he is, his wife doesn’t recognise him and he has been replaced by another man. That much is simple and very much like those old black and white movies from the 40s that I used to watch as a growing lad.

They really shouldn’t have given this much away because, frankly, the movie already has a transparent plot leading to one inevitable conclusion, which I will reveal in just a minute (you have been warned). Letting you know all the set up in the trailer before it’s even played out in the movie quite easily leads you to deduce the correct conclusions just from the way the characters behave (more pertinently, what they don’t say to each other that a normal couple might) and the way their body language works... something I’m sure the actors were very careful about, trying to pull the wool over the audiences eyes while at the same time trying to stay true to their character’s backstory... something that can’t be that easy to do without actually lying to the audience (well at least they can’t be accused of that).

But because you “know the score” you really do know what’s going on before even the opening credits are finished and the accident which sets up the film has even taken place. Like M. Night Shyamalan’s films The Village and The Sixth Sense, this is a movie which really wears it’s ending on its sleeve.

Okay, here we go then. Car crash. Neesons mind wiped but then he remembers he’s Dr. Martin Harris who’s about to give an important lecture on... oh, I don’t remember, something scientific. But his wife doesn’t remember him and she’s already got another replacement Dr. Martin Harris with her to deliver the all important lecture... not to mention that Neeson’s website has photos of this other guy and there are, wait for it, family photos. Conspiracy signals right here, yeah? They even have family photos. And most of this is information you can get easily enough by just watching the trailer - marketing dilemma... unfortunately you can’t sell the hook because the hook doesn’t hold up under scrutiny for longer than 5 minutes without giving itself away... but without trailering your hook then you don’t have anything unique to say about your movie other than “Ooh. You all went to see Taken and The Bourne Identity. We’d like similar amounts of money chucked at us too please. Come see our wannabe!”... so unfortunately... you have to trailer your flimsy hook!

And to ram the obvious final solution down your throats just that little bit harder, the “flashbacks” are treated with some very dreamlike effects to them. Seriously, this goes beyond the normal semiotics of cinema with the treatment of the film stock in these sections. Now, okay, this could be a stylistic flourish of the director but, frankly, my suspicions have already been more than aroused by the trailer. And when I say my suspicions have been aroused I mean the trailer is dancing naked around me talking dirty and tickling me under the chin aroused. I know these aren’t normal flashbacks we’ve got here, they’re fake memories and, even in the unlikely instance that they had indeed been flashbacks... then why the heck is Mr. Liam-I’m-a-simple-married-doctor-giving-a-lecture-here-folks-Neeson so good at keeping the enemy at bay with his jumpy, shouty, fighty stuff and his stunty-drivey-crashy stuff? Give me a break.

Okay... so I hope by now anyone still reading this will have cracked the so-called spoiler for this movie but, just in case you havent, I’ll spell it out for you. Yes, Liam Neeson is a bad guy assassin on a mission with his “wife” under cover. Yes the accident has wiped his memory and he’s taken on the fake memories of his own cover story and yes, the film then takes a terrible turn for the worse because once Liam figures out who he is and why he’s there, he then tries to stop it taking place. What? Honestly, half an hour with Diane Kruger warding off danger (so good in Inglourious Basterds but, like Neeson, wasted here) and he’s ready to switch sides and do the right thing? Why? What epiphany happened here that the audience wasn’t privy too? Talk about writing yourself into a corner and then running through the wet paint quickly in the hopes that nobody will notice your clumsy, writerly footprints.

Ok... let’s try to focus on anything good here. Ok... Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger and Frank Langella are all stand out here, although Langella’s a little bit over the top, if truth be told. But the one who really comes out on top here is... Bruno Ganz! Yep, that’s right. You read correctly. They somehow managed to convince the great German actor Bruno Ganz to be in this poor-man’s Bourne rip-off. And, once I’d gotten over the shock of how old he’s looking now (was half expecting that angel from Wings of Desire and its sequel to fall to earth on screen again, clutching his suit of armour) I realised that he is the only character I can respect in this mess of a movie. A seriously well-written and intelligent, considered performance from Ganz here and almost (almost) worth the price of the ticket... if only he’d had more screen time.

And that’s about it, I think, for both the good stuff and the bad stuff when it comes to this particular movie. Unknown is an okayish, no brainer actioner which will probably leave you fairly unsatisfied because it’s so easy to figure out what’s going on so quickly in the movie. A third rate version of The Bourne Identity... which makes it a second rate Salt in my book! If you like seeing the slow transformation of solid actor Neeson into Mr. Mature Action Hero... then you’d be better off staying away from this one and waiting until they’ve got Taken 2 in the can. And, yes, that movie is already in pre-production and awaiting shooting. Lotsa shooting is my guess ;-)