The 355

It's a Man's World—God Help Us (If She's Listening)

or

"We're Spies, Asshole!"

 

The reviews have not been kind to The 355, and the critics have teamed up around it like a circular firing squad. "Generic" says The Guardian. The L.A. Times says it "feels familiar and is a bit tired." The (London) Times calls it "lazy" and "box-ticking." Christy Lemire of Ebert.com criticized it for the clothes.*

 

Because it stars nice looking women and they should have been dressed more fashionably.

 

The Wikipedia article on it says Rotten Tomatoes reports it has an aggregate score of 4.4/10 (so it's the squishy green emoji). Cinemascore says audiences give it a B+ (which is better than average). I use that to illustrate the summary judgment despite the fact I hate aggregate web-sites, believing that metrics is the down-fall of Society, and that such sites do not promote critical thinking, and individuality. I think they work against people seeing movies, rather than promoting it. I give aggregate sites an "F" and don't visit them so their ads will get one less "little tingle." And one less reason for being.**

 

Add to that, I live on the west coast of the United States, but not in Los Angeles and certainly not in New York (it being on the east coast), so I don't entirely subscribe to the trope that "January is where movies go to die," seeing as I see a lot of good movies released outside of the Academy nominating window here. And I've seen my share of spy movies, action movies, and thrillers. The tendency for them to go over the the top now has only increased with the superhero genre—my eyes still hurt from the rolling they did watching Black Widow running up some scaffolding falling in space. It's tough to find a tough spy thriller anyone, or a smart one, or even a believable one, so many have come before spoiling the barrel.

 

But, the spy genre does teach one lesson: trust no one. The 355 extends that to movie critics.

Not that the film is without flaws. When an important member of a operative team is reported killed and the guy in charge says "I identified the body myself," I muttered "Well, I haven't seen the body..." and the exact nature of the computer drive—the McGuffin of the story—isn't made sufficiently clear other than it can hack into anything and "start World War III" and "set the world on fire" and people ooh and ahh over its elegance and sophistication. Until you drop it in the sink, that is. And just when I was thinking of calling this piece Everything Bond Does But in Heels" someone has to use 007's name in vain: "James Bond always ends up alone." (No, he doesn't—more times than not, he ends up in a boat!).

But, what sets this one apart is an attitude of viciousness, physical and psychological. Most spy-action movies are exercises for (what Gustav Hasford in "The Short-Timers" called) "the phony tough and the crazy brave"—fan-boys who've never had their noses broken. It looks good with all the kick-boxing moves and quick editing, but it's all ballet, essentially, designed that the feints look close, but couldn't knock a cigar out of a mouth. This one has plenty of that, although the fights are kept to a lesser amount. The women of The 355 just shoot people. And then shoot them again.

The story involves five women from different countries' intelligence services: American CIA agent "Mace" Brown (Jessica Chastain), German GND agent Marie Schmitt (Diane Kruger), Briton Khadijah Adiyeme (Lupita Nyong'o) former MI6 agent, Colombian DNI psychologist Graciela Rivera (Penélope Cruz), and (eventually) Chinese MSS agent Lin Mi Sheng (Bingbing Fan). They're all after this super-drive that is being ponied about by a former drug cartel, now re-branding to concentrate on raw, naked power. Brown and Schmitt are the lone wolves, driven agents with prominent chips—the non-computer kind—on their shoulder holsters. Adiyeme got out of the game and is a tech security consultant with a stable home-life, and Rivera is the civilian, a PTSD specialist—brought in to bring in an operative from the field (physician, heal thyself)—who has a normal family life with a husband and two kids. It's her job to ask "What are you talking about?" when the strategizing starts to get technical.

These five women are operating in a world of men—both bad guys and purported good guys. It was The King's Man—a not-great movie with some "moments"—that pointed out that the best undercover agents are staff, usually made up of women and minorities, so these five are negotiating through the "man's world" by virtue of being overlooked...or being dismissed by allies and enemies alike ("Are you under control?" one of them asks. "No." is the reply. "Are you?" "No!" Of course, they're not) They all have "issues" which might seem less important if they were traits exhibited in "the boys," but these five are all trying to prove something. The result is they have little patience for negotiating, and they're brutal.

Take, for instance, when Brown and Schmitt—who have been seeking the same target from different sides—draw down on each other. Stalemate. Then, Schmitt gives the command to drop the weapon and starts a countdown. "5!" She starts. Then Brown takes it over before that second is up—"4!" Schmitt is even quicker in response with "3!" and you just know something bad is going to happen. Or when they've got a courier tied up and want information and give him the old cliche "You can do this the easy way or the hard way" and he refuses. One of them just shoots him in the leg, tells him she's deliberately hit his femoral artery and he's only got two minutes before he bleeds out. There's a tourniquet waiting if he agrees.

That's matched when the bad guys have the five at gun-point and, when they get stone-walled, bring up screens of the people closest to them, and then summarily shoot one after the other in the effort to get one of them—any of them—to crack. The film is tougher, more mean-spirited, and less contrived in setting up complications than just about any spy or action film that I've seen in a long time. You know the complaint about most spy movies—why don't they just shoot 'em—this is one that does that. But none of the participants in the critical "kill-box" for this film have mentioned it or given it any credit for it.

No. It's all about "the fashion."

* In the comments section of Lemire's review, nobody pointed this out. They were too concerned that women couldn't take out men in a fight because they weigh less. They hadn't seen the movie. Most of the fights dispense with "the manly art" because the women just shoot people in the head. Twice. For good measure. Jessica Chastain's character does have a fight...with one man...and it goes on and on and she's very bruised and bleeding after it. Bingbing Fan has a fight with four guys using the broken base of a free-standing lamp—she dispatches one while putting it through his neck.

 

** Please notice my lack of links for those sites. You can find them on your own without my help.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Stephen Norrington, 2003) We've talked about The League of Gentlemen, Basil Dearden's ingenious caper movie. Writer Alan Moore had a devious idea for what he called "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," a comic series he created for the "America's Best Comics" publishers. He'd had editorial problems—"notes" as they're called—with the major comic book companies because he'd write stories for their licensed/trademarked characters only for editors to tell him "we/they can't do that, as we need the characters to sell breakfast cereal/action figures/underoo's/whatever." Rejection. It was just this sort of thing that forced him to create new characters for his landmark "Watchmen" series, when the characters he wanted to use (and rather irrevocably, too) were considered "too marketable or exploitable" by the company that had acquired them. He couldn't kill them off, give them less than honorable intentions—anything the Comics Code Authority considered "unheroic."

Quatermain, Tom Sawyer, Dorian Gray, The Invisible Man, Mina Murray and Captain Nemo

But, for this "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" he decided to make up his team consisting of characters that appeared in works in the public domain, where nobody could squawk or...sue...for that matter...over their use and what Moore wanted to do with them. So, his book has Mina Murray, recent paramour of Count Dracula, recruited by British agent Campion Bond (yeah, "they're" related) to recruit a team which consists of: Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard's books (particularly "King's Solomon's Mines"), Captain Nemo from "20,000 League Under the Sea," Dr. Griffin from "The Invisible Man", and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll (and if he's in, so is Mr. Hyde). The first story had the League recruited by Bond's  spy-master boss, "M" (who is eventually revealed to be Professor Moriarty) to look into the smuggling of the valuable anti-gravity mineral "cavorite" (from H. G. Wells' "First Men in the Moon") involving a Chinese criminal named "The Doctor" (who resembles Fu Manchu). The next series had them battling invading Martians during that bothersome "War of the Worlds" incident. A library of literature and "alternate histories" were there for Moore to exploit and the series enjoyed great success in comics circles.

Connery, being the biggest star, becomes the de facto leader of "The League"

Moore's work had already made it to the screen—The Hughes Brothers had adapted his "Jack the Ripper" series "From Hell"—and there had been talk of making a film of his "Watchmen" since the time it was published. Moore was apathetic—he hadn't liked the From Hell film and found the attempts to adapt his work tedious and less than faithful—and vowed to have nothing to do with them.

Mina Murray—a vampire in broad daylight in Africa

It would seem hard to screw up "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", however. The characters were well-known, Moore had breathed a less Victorian sensibility into them—while remaining true to the original concepts. But, that was assuming people read books. The screenplay—by James Dale Robinson—became a patchwork of Moore's concepts and studio-dictated "ideas," such as the character of Dorian Gray (played by Stuart Townsend), who for the film is not only immortal, but also unkillable, Mina (in the film and played by Peta Wilson) is not just immortal but a full-fledged vampire, The Invisible Man (played by Jason Flemyng) is another character entirely (use rights could not be obtained for Wells' character of Dr. Griffin), and—for the benefit of American audiences who might find the film too "European"-centric, a character named "Tom Sawyer" (played by Shane West) is added as a member of the U.S. Secret Service; there is nothing extraordinary about him, other than he might be able to paint fences. The thing is: if somebody doesn't know who "Dr. Jekyll" or "Captain Nemo" is, they're not going to know who "Tom Sawyer" is, either.

Captain Nemo (played by Naseeruddin Shah) is true to Jules Verne's Prince Dakkar version—not Disney's—but the emphasis is on Sean Connery's Alan Quatermain. His salary took a big chunk out of the budget, and, as one of the film's producers, he and the director clashed so often they nearly came to blows. Connery subsequently retired from acting—except for some voice-work, and Norrington, citing studio interference and the difficulty of working with large crews, stated he's never direct a large studio film again. They might have added Mary Lincoln to the characters if only to ask "How was the play?"

Quatermain reasons with Hyde

Where the film sticks to Moore's original it's rather good: Connery's a fine Quatermain—but the film-makers misspell his name at a rather crucial point—and the other actors acquit themselves rather well given what they have to do; the most unnerving thing is the sight of the gargantuan Hulk-like Mr. Hyde, even though it recalls the way artist Kevin O'Neill drew him in the books. Nemo's Nautilus also recalls the "Scimitar of the Sea," although how it could traverse the canals of Venice without scraping bottom remains a mystery, along with how Dorian Gray can survive multiple gun-shots and how a vampiric Mina can go out in the noon-day sun of Africa.

But, then, there's not much to the story. Moore's book was so "inside" that it would have left audiences in the library-dust. So, there's no "cavorite" and the main villain is "M"/Moriarty disguised as a phantom menace known as The Fantom (and played somewhat tepidly by Richard Roxburgh), whose scheme is to build the League in order to discover their secrets and thus make replicas of them for a rampaging world-conquering army of vampires, invisible men and Id-creatures armed with Nemo's technology. The question lies: they needed Quatermain to do that? Not really, and given that there were enough members of the League capable of double/triple-crossing their ranks, such a formation becomes unnecessary...even an empty effort that just delays things. Moriarty would never do that. I doubt Gaston Leroux's "Phantom" would do that. Even Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Phantom" wouldn't do that...he might fit in a song-soliloquy, but he'd get on with it.

It's something of a mess, and it's such a gory mess that even the several gateways to literature it provides ends up as so many dead-ends; no parent would take their kids to see this, although so many kids have some of these characters in their culture growing up (well, the last time I was a kid, they were). Such a waste of good material and the potential that Moore made of it, one of the most fanciful pastiches to come out of the comics world and out of literature.

An extraordinary waste, fiction be told.

The Nautilus crests...

Hanna

They're making a TV series of "Hanna" for some unfathomable reason (probably money) and it has been promoted with all the regularity of a water torture if you've seen a movie in the last couple months. But, nobody ever talks about the film it's based on...directed by the splendid Joe Wright. This was written at the time of the film's release.

"Grimm's Fairy Spy"
or
"Better Living Through Chemical Brothers"

Hanna isn't like any movie you've seen, that is unless you managed to catch some of the more stylish spy thrillers at the end of the 1960's. When the spy-craze went more mainstream, more A-list directors started to get into the fray and suddenly the thrills started to be taken over by style as those film-makers attempted to impose some of their own creative instincts into the genre. Sometimes the results made for merely a sub-par thriller, with style winning the cold war over substance, while others of their ilk were just plain pretentious.  Some...were interesting (like this one is, and like The American was last year).

Joe Wright is one of the better British directors coming out BBC television work.  He's done his bit for the classics, old and new (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) quite deftly handling the drawing room choreography and even putting a nicely modern spin on things. But, his 2009 film of The Soloist showed a director who wanted to experiment with the form, break out of the stodgy "Beeb" way of doing things and shake the story-telling up a bit (in that film, he turned Los Angeles into a living, breathing, rumbling sci-fi character looming over its strata of citizenry). It was interesting to see him attached as director to what looked like a common "actioner," and one wondered what he might bring to it, given his three previous films and how he appeared to be changing his style.

Change it, he did. Hanna is a weird mixture of gloss and QT-perversion, with some very strange camera work that, somehow, never manages to not tell you what is going on, to whom, where and why. No matter how over-the-top the theatrics become, Wright never forgets the basic job of keeping the audience informed, and with a screenplay spare on details and depending on the visual to tell the story, his discipline is critical (imagine, for instance, if Tom Hooper had directed it!) for any basic understanding of the film. 

Hanna  heaps on the atmospherics, not only with a brazen fairy-tale sub-text, but an all-encompassing sound-design/Euro-electronica musical score by The Chemical Brothers,* that recall some of the '60's/'70's work of such composers as Mikis Theodorakis and Giorgio Moroder.  But the thumping, edgy noises permeate the entire soundtrack, not just the music, from the sweet tune that one of the Hanna-hunters (Tom Hollander, cast completely against type) whistles, quite nullifying any element of surprise,** to the pounding chase music that keeps the attention focused while Wright spins his camera or shifts perspective, *** to the creepy metal noises and animal sounds that permeate this world. 

It begins in Finland, in the snow as a caribou is being hunted by a lone figure in fur. She dispatches the animal with one arrow shot ("I just missed your heart"), and begins to dress the animal for food. "You're dead!" says a figure behind her, and a rapid brutal fight breaks out, dependent less on fast editing than rhythm, and she is soon slammed to the ground, a snow angel against her will. "Drag the deer back yourself," says the man, who it turns out is Hanna's father (Eric Bana).

She is Hanna Heller (Saoirse Ronan—pronounced "Seersha"—and she worked with Wright in Atonement, and specifically asked that he direct this) and it is all survivalist training. Hanna has been raised to live on the land, kill and cook her own food, have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything (except electronics, apparently) given that her schooling is from the encyclopedia, speak several languages and have a detailed history that is nothing like her own.

What is her history? What is her father's? We don't get too deep into the film before we learn he's a rogue security agent gone missing, and he's a bee in the bonnet of Marissa Viegler (Cate Blanchett—imagine her being creepy and then go a few steps further), an operative high up the chain of command. And she is Hanna's target. And Hanna must get to her before Marissa can find her.  The why's will come, eventually, but already we've invaded a fairy-tale landscape with the sheltered princess (who can snap your neck) and an evil step-mother who stays only a few evil steps behind the whole movie. And given Ronan's goose-like grace throughout the film, one can't help but call to mind all sorts of folk-tales of changelings and bargains and revenge.  But it's a spy thriller, too, as cold as they come, so don't expect "happily ever after."

For me, it was a simple story told well that impressed me throughout.

But it just missed my heart.

* Their impact on the film is incredible. I kept imagining what the film would be like with a "standard" thriller score, and always came up with a duller, less propulsive film.

** This recalls Peter Lorre's child killer in Fritz Lang's M (1931). Hollander vaguely recalls Lorre's look, and, later,  Wright stages a fight to the tune "M" whistled from Peer Gynt—"In the Hall of the Mountain King," (after The Social Network, this piece is getting a lot of traction).

*** "What does music feel like?" Hanna asks at an early stage of the script. Here, it feels like having a heart attack in zero-g.  One of the reasons this film DOESN'T have a traditional score is that Hanna, the character, doesn't know music, and as we're following her struggles, the music reflects her mood, whether placid or on the run.  It's rather interesting where those moods show up.