“If MeToo were a production company”, it would be “proud” to have made The 355, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. This is an action movie in which all the biggest kicks are delivered by women, while the men are either “gentle stay-at-home types”, or duplicitous rotters. (The film’s title refers to the codename of a female spy during the American Revolution.) “I’m all for turning tables”, but regrettably, the “robust gender politics serve a preposterous plot” that is “as yawningly unoriginal as in any of the pictures it tries so hard to subvert”. A baddy has got hold of a fiendish piece of software with the power to hobble financial markets and bring down power grids; and it falls to “maverick CIA agent” Mace (Jessica Chastain) and her all-female team of spies (Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o, Fan Bingbing and Penélope Cruz) to retrieve it.
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