The 355

Year 15, Day 80 - 3/21/23 - Movie #4,381

BEFORE: Diane Kruger carries over from "Mr. Nobody", and I'm going to double-up on my TCM stats today, because I may not be able to get to this tomorrow. 

It's Day 21 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Costume Dramas" (before 8 pm) and "Courtroom Dramas" (8 pm and after).  Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" (1939

8:00 am "Young Bess" (1953)

10:00 am "Knights of the Round Table" (1953)

12:00 pm "Ivanhoe" (1952)

2:00 pm "Raintree County" (1955)

5:00 pm "Tess" (1979)

8:00 pm "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962)

10:15 pm "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957)

12:30 am "12 Angry Men" (1957)

2:15 am "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959)

5:00 am "Inherit the Wind" (1960)

Ha ha, doing well again - I've seen that "Knights of the Round Table", also "Tess" and ALL of the courtroom dramas - that gives me 7 out of 11 today, and brings me to 111 seen overall out of 239, so back up to 46.4%.  

And for tomorrow, Day 22, the themes are "Religious" (before 8 pm) and "Fantasy" (8 pm and after). 

7:15 am "One Foot in Heaven" (1941)

9:15 am "The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima" (1952)

11:00 am "The Shoes of the Fisherman" (1969)

1:45 pm "Boys Town" (1938)

3:30 pm "The Nun's Story" (1959)

6:15 pm "Black Narcissus" (1947)

8:00 pm "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941)

9:45 pm "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" (1946)

11:45 pm "Lost Horizon" (1937)

2:15 am "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940)

4:15 am "Tom Thumb" (1958)

6:00 am "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1935)

8:30 am "Brigadoon" (1954)

Wow, I thought I'd do a little better on "Fantasy" but I guess not. I'm going to claim that version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", though, because I remember seeing Mickey Rooney as Puck.  And I did watch "The Nun's Story" with Audrey Hepburn a few years ago, but that's only 2 out of 13, so now I'm at 113 seen out of 252, so down again to 44.8%

THE PLOT: When a top-secret weapon falls into mercenary hands, a wild-card CIA agent joins forces with three international agents on a mission to retrieve it, while staying a step ahead of a mysterious woman who's tracking their every move. 

AFTER: Well, on one hand, it's really great that there's a (mostly) female action movie that isn't just "Ocean's Eight". (Or "Domino", which was a big disappointment for me in January - hey, look, she's a fashion model AND an assassin!).  On the other hand, I might be more impressed if the "secret weapon" macguffin hadn't also been featured in two cheezy Bruce Willis movies that I watched last year.  (Hey, look, it's the ultimate "hacking" drive, it can get you into any closed system with all its encrypto-doohickeys!  It feels like some screenwriter just learned what a closed system is and decided to write his way around one.). Also, this is the story you kind of expect when the co-writer of the "Catwoman" movie and the co-writer of several "X-Men" movies (including "Dark Phoenix") team up.  

Speaking of that, it's been FOUR years since "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" the film that was so bad, all movie theaters everywhere closed soon after it was released.  Yeah, that happened, look it up. And how can it be that I haven't seen a movie with Penelope Cruz in almost FIVE years?  In that time, I've seen at least four movies with TED Cruz in them, that just doesn't seem right. Also, how can it be six years since "Murder on the Orient Express" got released?  Time's been moving faster or something, I'll be that 118-year old guy like in "Mr. Nobody" before too long. 

Anyway, it's a killer idea to have a female CIA agent team up with an MI-6 agent that she knows, and together they have to track down a German agent who rescued a Colombian psychologist who was sent to work with a rogue agent who found that device after a shoot-out.  That rogue agent just wanted to hand over the drive to the right people for a quick payday, but he made the bad move of being in a film where men are relatively disposable if they're not the villains.  And, even if they are the villains, they've got to go down sometime, because in the end it's the females who will be left standing and ready for the sequel.  (It's kind of refreshing to see men taken hostage for once, but should it be?  Discuss.)

This movie bombed at the box office, though, making back only $27 million of the $75 million it cost to make - supposedly people stayed away because it seemed a bit too much like "Charlie's Angels" or maybe a "JANES Bond" film.  But it also got released in January 2022, before most people were comfortable going back to theaters, and those that were comfortable going back were already planning to see "Spider-Man: No Way Home".  But the distributor only planned to have it in theatrical release for 45 days anyway, it was already scheduled for Amazon Prime. But if the complaint was that this was "standard spy fare repackaged in girl-power wrapping", that itself is a contradiction, because if all the main characters are women, that's by definition not "standard".  And if it managed to gender-swap the action movie and have that not be very unusual, isn't THAT also a mark of progress, that people didn't discount this as impossible or unlikely, for women to be action heroes?  If "Charlie's Angels" and "Wonder Woman" paved the way, naturally one would hope that more examples in the same genre would follow, it's too bad that people then consider this "old hat" - what do you want, an action movie full of trans agents?  People say they want more diversity, and then when they get it, it's met a with tepid response?

There's a lot to like here, however, including scenes where all four lead women bond over beers, that's not something you tend to see in any female-centric movie.  However, when they're discussing their "first times", it's not what you think, they're talking about the first time they each killed somebody in the field.  And the action goes from Washington to Morocco to Shanghai, where the agents have to go undercover at a black-market weapons auction, where people are bidding on collectible vases that have guns or illicit computer drives hidden inside.  The villains have taken the women's friends and family around the world as hostages, and threaten to kill them unless they get the drive in their hands.  Once they do, the "355" agents have to track the drive down AGAIN, rescue their newest member and destroy the drive so nobody can ever use it again to knock out city power grids and cause planes to crash. (The power grids are bad enough on their own, and there are enough plane crashes too, no need to make more happen.)

And after they're successful, who gets promoted at the CIA?  A man, of course.  Yeah, that kind of tracks. But just wait, there could still be a sequel... 

Also starring Jessica Chastain (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Penelope Cruz (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Bingbing Fan (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past"), Lupita Nyong'o (last seen in "Us"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "Domino"), Sebastian Stan (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Jason Flemyng (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Sylvester Groth (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), John Douglas Thompson (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Emilio Insolera, Leo Staar, Pablo Scola, Marcello Cruz, Jason Wong (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Raphael Acloque (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Don Dumaresq, Alexander Cardona, Francisco Labbe (last seen in "The Hustle"), Waleed Elgadi (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Oleg Kricunova, Eldi Dundee, Yoon C. Joyce (last seen in "Everest"), David Yu, Sebastian Roldan, Maud Druine, Adam Strawford

RATING: 6 out of 10 market stalls in Marrakesh