I got a booster vaccine last week just so that I feel
comfortable catching _355_ in a theater. The film has
had absolutely rotten luck; its release was pushed
back a year due to COVID, only to run headlong into
a new variant.

It also got very poor reviews for its plot -- as though
any but a handful of James bond, Mission Impossible, or
Marvel flicks can be said to have any plot whatsoever.
One of the main pleasures of this film is the interactions
between the characters. For a cast this large, the film
manages to isolate a pair of protagonist at a time to
let their chemistry develop. This happens even in the
action scenes; repeatedly the protagonists split up
into pairs. The film mostly avoids the expository,
mechanics explication of the MI movies; those sequences
tend to focus on individuals, not relationships, but
the critics seem to be looking for those.

Jessica Chastain and Diane Kruger are the alpha chicks
(from CIA and BND of Germany, respectively) out to
hunt down a cyber cryptographic device that can be used
to bring down planes and black-out cities. In the early
goings the two spies are really going for each other's
throat. Eventually they go rogue, team up, drafting
others along, fly from Paris to Morocco to Shanghai --
with Taipei standing in. Both actresses just came out
of films with brutal action sequences (_Ava_ and _In the
Fade_); they look very powerful and convincing as veterans
of a thousand campaigns. Chastain in particular get her
face smashed up again; her brushes with CIA management
are no easily than those in _Zero Dark Thirty_ either.
Kruger replaces Marion Cotillard in the original cast,
and I cannot imagine the laid-back Cotillard managing a
fraction of the stunts that Kruger pulls off. The big
surprise is Lupita Nyong'o as a former MI6 cyber expert.
She has a really interesting relationship with her
understanding boyfriend who knows too well the danger
of going into the field. The British actress is the
youngest of the headliners but isn't a junior partner
at all. Regretfully, the junior partner would be Fan
Bingbing, who doesn't have a line on her face (even
Nyong'o sports a scar) and comes off as a CGI creation
completely out of place among her older, battle-hardened
costars. The make-up department really lets her down
here. Still, the Chinese actress had her film credit
erased by the People's Republic of China, so she must
have done something right morally speaking, and deserves
our support.

There is a big emotional scenes near the end where the
terrorists take the protagonists' loved ones hostage, and
in fact shoot many of them. It reminds us of how good
Penelope Cruz, playing the non-violent member of the team,
can be as an actress, although Chastain, taking on the
protector and leader role, really shines here too. But
most of the film is about show-casing the actresses'
toughness and physical prowess -- a very much underrated
part of actresses' portfolio. Chastain and Cruz recently
went on a late-night talk show and gushed about Meryl
Streep. Chastain told a funny story about her awkward
response when running into Streep during her Broadway
_The Heiress_ stint. This is ironic because Streep never
had to do the tough physical stunts today's actresses go
through. Where I grew up we had a TV station which
recruited young actors and threw them into bootcamps where
they learned to sing, dance, and train in martial arts
(men and women). Looking back, those who survived the
crash course (including Tony Leung of _2046_) were really
superhuman, and deserved all the successes they had.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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