The 355

About 20 minutes into the spy actioner The 355, Penelope Cruz walks into the frame and you’re left asking yourself that cliched line: what’s a gorgeous actress like her doing in a dump of a film like this?

This may have also been the question everyone cast in The 355 might have asked themselves at one time or another.

Apparently, director Simon Kinberg was pitched this idea by Jessica Chastain during their time together on the sets of X-Men: Dark Phoenix — another great disaster of a film. Between Chastain, an A-list actress, and Kinberg, a powerhouse screenwriter and producer in Hollywood (he has written Mr and Mrs Smith, Sherlock Holmes, Jumper, and the X-Men films Apocalypse, Days of Future Past, The Last Stand), they had enough clout to get this idea rolling from Universal — but it’s not like the package and the plot itself didn’t have appeal.

Chastain, Cruz, Chinese superstar actress Fan Bingbing, Diane Kruger, and Lupita Nyong’o play a group of international spies from America, Colombia, China, Germany and Britain who must work together to stop a terrorist organisation from starting World War III. Édgar Ramírez and Sebastian Stan also star as the two spy men who get taken out early in the film. The title, we’re told, is derived from America history: Agent 355 was the codename of a female spy during the days of the American Revolution.

The screenplay by Kinberg and Theresa Rebeck (Catwoman, Gossip) is a seen-it-all dud, and Kinberg’s directorial touch — unimaginative and lacking in style, conviction and execution — is a perfect match for the facileness.

Despite a star-studded cast, The 355 is a seen-it-all dud with a facile script and direction. As the fifth film of the franchise, Scream knows the ins and outs of the genres as much as the audience

The actresses — especially Kruger — play their parts with earnestness, darting from one international location and action sequence to another, but they can do only so much, given the bad material at hand.

Especially wasted is Cruz, as the pacifist spy psychologist (yes, she’s a shrink who is sent on a deadly mission) who only fires one gunshot in the film; her shot hits its target dead-on, but the filmmakers miss by a mile-wide margin.

The 355 is rated PG-13. Don’t get fooled by the Jason Bourne reference the smoothly cut trailer uses to lure you in

Scream

Scream screams the meaning of the word ‘meta’ so loud and so very consistently that you can hear its reverb echoing throughout the film’s two-hour runtime.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines meta as: cleverly self-referential; having an explicit awareness of itself. The idea of using the self-referential technique as the main narrative hook was unique in 1996, when the first Scream film was made by horror master Wes Craven and the then newbie wunderkind writer Kevin Williamson.

Scream was a homage that didn’t resort to parody in the done-to-death slasher genre, and the characters owned the self-referential approach and the awareness of the conventions and clichés of slasher films as a means to escape certain death from the long ‘ghostface’ killer.

Scream (2022), is the fifth entry in the Scream franchise (it also has a three-season show, two of which are available to watch on Netflix) — and although Craven passed away in 2015, and the current writer isn’t Williamson, the meta-ness of the franchise is just as prevalent.

It’s 25 years later, and a new ghostface killer starts hacking off victims, forcing the film series’ legacy cast (Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette) to return to the sleepy town of Woodsboro.

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Ready or Not, Devil’s Due), milk out effective performances from their young and old cast, and their calm, steady and extremely reverential take on the material makes the story’s red herrings seem that much more effective.

Writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man; Ready or Not), however, deliver a sorry excuse of a reason for the main machinist’s big reveal at the end, which somewhat takes the high point out of the climax. It’s a small deterrent in an otherwise enjoyable (final?) entry that knows the ins and outs of the genres as much as the audience.

The franchise continues to be the wink and a nudge you can take seriously — and perhaps this all-knowing smirk that doesn’t insult the viewers’ intelligence is the only effective way left to approach this genre.

Scream is rated R for a lot of intense stabbing, slicing and shooting

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 23rd, 2022