Jessica Chastain leads an international group of talented secret agencies in "Unit 355" - a spy thriller with a female focus, which seeks to combine "Ocean 8" with adrenaline-rich brands like Jason Bourne and "Impossible Mission".
The idea itself is welcome, but except for a few brief moments of grace, the execution is absurd, ridiculous and utterly generic.
Chastain plays Mace, a CIA agent who is sent to Paris with her partner (Sebastian Stan) to purchase a tiny device that endangers world peace.
Of course, the simple task gets out of hand, and Mace soon finds herself complicated up to the neck with a host of intelligence agencies, all of whom are also interested in the device.
From there, Mace pampers a British computer genius (Lupita Nyong'o), a German agent (Diane Kruger) and a Colombian psychologist (Penelope Cruz), and together they embark on a decidedly unexciting pursuit that will take them to the markets of Morocco and the towers of Shanghai.
In between the girls get caught up in a series of chaotic action scenes (filmed with such a shaking hand that they can make you seasick) and shoot clichés like "Once we knew who the enemy was, today everyone is in the shadows" (a phrase we hear in spy movies since the 80s, and no, I do not Exaggerations).
Chastain does her best to look tough, Nyong'o is required to recite technological scales at every opportunity, while Cruz is the frightened character who constantly says she must go home (her performance here proves that even great actresses sometimes deliver terrible performances).
The only one who manages to get out of this somehow safely is Kruger, who is endowed with a sufficient amount of natural vocals.
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The awful mediocrity of the film becomes more understandable when one realizes that the person who signed it is the screenwriter-director Simon Kinberg.
Kinberg's previous film, X-Men: The Dark Phoenix, was one of the worst superhero films of the last decade, and it is always advisable to lower expectations when his name appears on the credits list.
"Unit 355" may not be as bad as "The Dark Phoenix," but it lacks a drop of creativity or originality.
His twists are so predictable that they can be seen from space, and the action scenes do not deliver the goods in any way.
The intentions were good.
But this movie is bad.
Score: 4
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