It’s a textbook case of you go your way and algorithm. Technology is the new drug of choice and it’s up to a quintet of international secret agents to recover an external hard drive that, if placed in the wrong hands, could literally break the internet. Marked down from Ocean’s 8, The 355 posits 5 empowered marquee-grabbers (Jessica Chastain, Diane Kruger, Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong'o, and Bingbing Fan), a veritable United Nations of pulchritudinous star power, to open up the same past-its-expiration-date can of whoop-ass that their action-jacked forefathers have been feasting on for decades. We’re conditioned to expect a film that commences in Bogotá, Colombia to be drug related. Rather than allow his audience to make a connection between death by USB as a substitute for heroin, co-writer and director Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Dark Phoenix) repeatedly relies on dialogue to spell it out. The action is non-stop, but the same can be said of the pain incurred from a throbbing toothache. At one point Kruger’s character claims not to play by the rules, another laughable trope in a film so content to color within the lines. (2022) — Scott Marks
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