Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
This week, on Hotchpotch Production and Ruinous Inadequacies:
Jessica Chastain pitches Simon Kinberg an all-female Mission Impossible on the set of Dark Phoenix, and the result stars Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o, and Fan Bingbing chasing a drive that can hack anything on Earth (“like ghosts in a machine”). On paper: perfect. On screen: a movie that went to the trope store and said, I’ll take one of everything. Silent helicopter? Check. Give us the room? CHECK.
Greg explains why he loves this movie more than probably anybody besides Simon Kinberg and will rewatch it every other year for the rest of his life. Joe blames the writing. Together, they try to figure out how a cast this stacked made a movie with a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes… And an 86% from the audience. These are our people.
Note: This transcript has been auto-generated, so… You know… It’s not our fault.
Host: All right. Greg. And the movie we just watched. We get to watch the origin story of a ragtag crew. The 355. Pretty cool name, if you ask me. Yeah. If you had an origin story for your ragtag crew, what would your name be? I think you and I are in the same crew. Awesome. And I think because we met and lived at 1010 North Garden in Bellingham.
Host: Yeah, I think we’re the 1010. Absolutely. 1010 for life, I think, as our rallying cry also. So you were my first roommate. I was your first roommate. What does the 1010 do based on when we lived together that first year? I know we put peas on the thermostat to make the heater for the house turn on. I think we laughed a lot.
Host: Yeah, I remember this when we would hang out with cam and you and me and whoever else was kind of floating through just how much fun we were having doing absolutely nothing. I think we spent more time saying, what do you want to do? You want to go somewhere, you want to do something? And we would just kind of do that.
Host: I’ll tell you what the 1010 does. Never goes to bed because no one’s saying it’s time for bed. Exactly. Which was the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me? Yeah, it was awesome. So, yeah, I think that I think the 1010 just hang out talking about plans and actually never doing anything. A lot of times they’re probably the tired 1010 because they fell asleep on the couch and did not make it all the way to their room.
Host: Yeah. You had that roofing job, I remember, and you were getting up at, like over the summer, like five in the morning or something crazy. And it just was not right. It was not right for me, for anybody. That’s just not cool. Yeah. All right. Should we get to the show? I think we should. Let’s do it.
Clip: Remember that story that they told us about in training?
Clip: About George Washington’s first female spy during the revolution? They called her agent 355 because they didn’t want the world to know her real name. But her legacy lives on.
Clip: Only thing that some of my telling.
Clip: We’re the top agents from around the world American, British, German, Colombian, Chinese. But now.
Clip: We have a common enemy.
Clip: They can.
Clip: Start World War three from simple reach of their keyboard.
Clip: So we need to join forces.
Clip: With the best in the world of what you do. You have cameras.
Clip: In, your jewelry comes in, your earrings, you bump, I grab, the target is on the move.
Clip: You’re not going in there alone. We go together.
Host: I like the.
Clip: New team. We’re the three, five, five.
Host: The year is 2022. And Simon Kinberg teams up with Jessica Chastain to make a movie that she has come up with called the 355. She pitched this movie to him while they were making X-Men Dark Phoenix together. We are talking about Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz, Bing Bing fan, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o, Sebastian Stan, Edgar Ramirez, and I’ll just throw in John Douglas Thompson in there because I felt like he did a pretty good job.
Host: Joe Sky Tucker, this is a very exciting night for me because we are finally getting to a movie that I love for. It’s very hard to say why I love this movie, but I love this movie. We’re going to discover why in the next little while. Joe Sky Tucker. What makes the 355A great bad movie? For our listeners?
Host: This is the second time we have done this.
Host: It was an early kind of practice round for us, I think when we did it the first time.
Host: Yeah, 2022. I definitely.
Host: Like it more this time. Oh, the pieces that drive me crazy still drive me crazy in that. But there.
Host: Is.
Host: This movie I feel like went to the Trope store and just said, I will take one of everything. And for that I love it. I think I know why you love this movie, because the opening shot has a helicopter out of nowhere. And then never again do we see a.
Host: Helicopter in the movie. It’s just like, this is for Greg right here. Yep. Yeah. We have this is an audience of one, and this shot is for him. And we are putting this in here. We’ll call that forever the swine heart. Oh, I like it. So the story is interesting. I mean, it’s something we’ve seen before, you know, a piece of technology that has the power to do anything you want with it.
Host: And, you know, it’s the knock list. It’s the this it’s the whatever. It’s the god’s eye, it’s the the entity, whatever you want to put to it. It’s it’s that trope. And then we have a ragtag crew coming together to try to stop it. So all of on paper is like just kiss of what we want, right? Yeah.
Host: Where it falls off for me is the writing in this in this movie is just so stilted, like, let’s get to the next scene. And, you know, I wanted, like, give me a little Tony Gilroy, give me somebody who really understands how people talk and dialog, because if it had better snappy or dialog and like a little bit more drawn characters, this could be in a class with the Gray Man.
Host: But sadly it is not so. Okay, but tell me, Greg Swineherd, why do you love this movie more than probably anybody else besides maybe Simon Kinberg?
Host: Why do I love this movie? I think I love this movie for a lot of reasons. One is the initial goal of it was Jessica Chastain thought, what if we made an all female Mission Impossible James Bond movie? And that’s just like, on paper, perfect. You know, that sounds great. She’s making a movie with Simon Kinberg in 2019.
Host: They’re making X-Men Dark Phoenix and she pitches it to him. Simon Kinberg has written and produced a bunch of the X-Men movies. He produced The Martian, which we did last week. Very well known, well-regarded, seemingly nice Guy in town and Dark Phoenix completely tanked at the box office. It was a pretty big it was the reason X-Men movies stopped getting made.
Host: And he went out there and did like a press tour of like, this is my fault. I totally take responsibility for this. And I heard an interview with him on Kim Masters show on kicker, and he was lovely. He was like, oh my gosh, this guy seems great. She’s talking about his kids. He was talking about the power of of the X-Men story and why it was so great and why he loved raising his kids while making those movies and what those movies taught his kids and blah, blah, blah.
Host: I was just immediately like, well, I’m going to track with Simon Kinberg. This guy seems awesome. And then this was the next movie. So I was I was so excited. This movie was coming out. And we love great movies. We love great bad movies. On this show. We swear that every movie we do on this show has to be great for one reason or another, or we’re not going to do it.
Host: And this movie has greatness to it, at least in theory. And a lot of times, a lot of times the greatness is right there in front of the camera, and it seems stilted for some reason. And yeah, I am so fascinated by movies that on paper, and seemingly they had all the right people in the room. Yeah, and it just doesn’t quite come together.
Host: And that is as interesting to me as a movie that does come together for some reason, you know? Yeah. Where it makes a wrong turn is as interesting to me as when movies make right turns. And so that’s one of the reasons I love this movie, too, because it doesn’t quite work. And yet I will probably watch it every other year for the rest of my life.
Host: I have to say that.
Host: This time around, I was, I think, in a much better headspace. When I watched it, I was kind of I was ready for it. Yeah. So it allowed me to love all the parts. Like I love the parts where it’s terrible because it’s just like you’re talking about the pieces that just don’t fit. And I love the parts that are great.
Host: Yeah, there’s some really fun action scenes within this. Totally. There’s a really interesting idea throughout. And then the fact that it just hits so many of our tropes and drinking games, yeah, all along the way, it was just so joyful to watch when there’s literally a scene where he says, give us the room. And if I could have jumped out of my seat and then a backflip, I would.
Host: Have love it, I.
Host: Love it. It was I was so unexpectedly perfect. But again, they have all the ingredients you’d want.
Host: Yeah.
Host: And it just kind of doesn’t all come together. It’s like a soup that just doesn’t finish at the end or whatever the right, or a souffle that falls. I don’t know, whatever the that metaphor that I’m trying to grab for is, but like, it’s all right there, all the ingredients are ready and it just kind of gets there and then it just kind of falls apart.
Host: And then it’s got like three different endings. Sebastian Stan is the bad guy, but not the bad guy. And then but he, like you, think he’s been killed about five different times throughout the movie. And he’s great in this. Shout out to his Taylor on this show or on this movie. He his suit.
Host: Is like, he looks great.
Host: Just perfect in this movie. So yeah, you know, there’s again, lots of fun things. There’s Hobbs and shot travel logic all over the place. You know, they magically find outfits to get into, like some sort of fancy auction. At one point after they are on the run from all the world and they you have no idea how they got from Morocco to like Shanghai or Singapore or wherever they are.
Host: Yeah, you know, all of those things where they just don’t explain it again. It’s a great bad movie. It’s what you know, you’re watching at that moment, man.
Host: And it’s so funny when you’re watching it. You’re trying to figure out why isn’t this really congealing. You know, like you say, a soup. And sometimes when you eat a soup and it hasn’t really spent much time cooking on the stove and it’s really like, wow, this really is just beans and tomatoes and whatever, you know, you taste all the different flavors, but they don’t really congeal into an amazing super stew.
Host: That is kind of what this is. And I cannot entirely blame the script because I feel like it’s from scene to scene. They’ll say stuff and I’ll think, that’s a really interesting idea. I wonder why it’s falling flat for me right now, you know? And that happens, like, I don’t know, 5 or 6 times in this movie where I think, oh, that’s a good idea.
Host: Oh, this is cool. I like what they’re doing here. And yet I don’t love the movie while it’s happening. And since I just am so sympathetic to Simon Kinberg, my first theory was it’s the editors. And the first time I noticed it is in that scene when the five stars of this movie are sitting down and having a drink and talking about the first time they killed somebody, because they’re all like international spies.
Host: Yeah, that scene should be funny. That scene should be dramatic. And it’s kind of neither. It’s just people saying lines to each other and then kind of blankly staring for a minute before we cut to another person. It is really, in my mind, poorly edited. Yeah. And there are so many scenes in this movie that could be legitimately funny if they were just edited a little bit tighter in my mind.
Host: And so it just made me think like, it seems like this could be funny and a fun, you know, ragtag crew to hang out with. But it’s being edited seemingly lazily. So it’s edited by John Gilbert and Lee Smith. John Gilbert hasn’t done as much as Lee Smith. Lee Smith in the room. He did like a bunch of the Dark Knight trilogy.
Host: He did inception. He’s done some Peter Weir movies like Master and Commander Fearless, The Truman Show. I mean, these are legitimately amazing movies. Interstellar, Dunkirk 1917. So there are real editors in the room, at least one real editor in the room that is like royalty, right? And it just made me think, you know, I never felt this way during those movies.
Host: Yeah. So I think we have to put this squarely on Simon Kinberg. I think that it really is. The director didn’t get what he wanted to get out of this movie, so I’ve been wrestling with that all week as we’ve been preparing for this episode. And so I was like, you know what? I’ve never watched the X-Men Dark Phoenix movie because I just heard it was so horrible.
Host: But this is a professional podcast. I need to go back and do some research here. So I watched the first half hour of that movie, and it’s kind of solid the first 30 minutes or the first, you know, 20, 25 minutes, really well done and does not suffer from the problems that this movie has. So I don’t know what happened here.
Host: Maybe there were too many cooks in the kitchen. Maybe Simon Kinberg just wasn’t the right cook. But that’s so fascinating because it’s impossible to make a movie, period. It’s nearly impossible to make a good one. I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Howard Hawks, that old film director from like the 40s. He has a saying that I don’t know why I haven’t brought it up yet on this show, but he has a saying that a good movie is three good scenes and no bad ones, and I love that.
Host: I think that’s something that’s a standard we should probably start kind of bringing up more often on this show. I think there are good ones, so it passes that test to be on our show, but there are some bad scenes that just kind of don’t hang together and, you know, don’t really make sense.
Host: Again, on paper, everything should be it should be perfect. Yeah. But the pacing of the movie feel off, the characters and their relationships feel a little off. The first half of the movie almost feels too slow as they’re kind of building up. The last half feels a little too fast at different points. It doesn’t quite know where it’s going.
Host: Like, what is the final scene? Who is the bad guy? So it kind of suffers from maybe too many ideas throughout it. Like the best movies are pretty simple in terms of we need to stop this technology from falling into the wrong hands. So that’s like the premise of the the movie. Sure. And then to get to that, then there’s options on the dark web that they’re traveling to.
Host: And then, right, like they never explained how a drug cartel kingpin in Colombia, his son, managed to create a piece of technology that can literally blow up planes in the air like.
Host: It is totally hand waved like son with a laptop comes in the room and suddenly planes are dropping out of the sky for fun. Yeah, yeah.
Host: And then, like, the main bad guy that we kind of find out shows up at that scene. Yeah. Now, this is just based on my very rough knowledge of cartels. They have pretty strong security, sure, but they just let this group of people in with guns.
Host: Yeah, they don’t frisk them. They don’t do anything right. They just welcome them in and they’re there to buy the technology. And then the deal go sideways. And then there are commandos in the jungle for.
Host: Coincidentally, they’re like standing on them.
Host: Yeah. And then one of the commandos ends up with the technology after, you know, a pretty nice action scene. I’m not going to lie. That was a fun action scene in the open, like, you know.
Host: Yeah. People getting shot.
Host: Yeah. And then somehow that person who’s in Colombia ends up in Paris.
Host: Yeah, sure.
Host: Yeah. I don’t know why. And people have learned that he is trying to sell this just to support his family. They make that very clear that he’s like a good guy.
Host: So you have all of that happen in the first like 20 minutes of this movie? Yeah. Then you throw in the relationship with Sebastian Stan and.
Host: They’re like undercover trying to buy the drive in Paris. And then it’s they have to pretend like they’re married.
Host: And then are they a couple, are they not? They’re in a situation. Ship all of that.
Host: She says, you’re my best friend and I don’t want to mess this up. And then they just immediately start making out.
Host: Yeah, immediately mess it up.
Host: Immediately mess it up. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, there’s so many great bad things we have to talk about in the first 20 minutes of this movie. The first thing is when I went back to watch this movie a second time this week, and I was really trying to wrestle with where does it break bad for me? And it is literally in that first scene, rich guy shows up in Colombia to buy this drive that, you know, is basically the the whatever machine it can, you can hack into everything.
Host: And he decides he wants to buy it, and then he shoots the guy who’s made it, dad or no shoots the the guy who.
Host: Made it, son.
Host: Right. And then right after that, I don’t understand who’s shooting who.
Host: No. Yeah.
Host: Like the guy who arrived to buy the stuff. It seems like his men would be ready for this to happen. And they would, like, shoot everybody in the room, and they’d be able to steal this drive, but suddenly they start shooting. And this is Simon Kinberg bad right here. We have no idea what’s happening almost immediately. And maybe he’s like, you know, this is just mayhem.
Host: And they aren’t going to be able to get the drive, but we just cut to a guy by a window who starts shooting at them, and then they’re cutting the scene like the people who were spying outside have already broken in in our shooting everywhere. And there’s like this crazy firefight happening. But that hasn’t happened yet. But it seems like it has already.
Host: And then and then they just kind of walk in and they’re shooting as well. It’s just poorly staged action and I have no idea what’s happening. And that’s the very first thing that happens in this movie. And then that happens over and over and over again. So I think that might be one of the problems.
Host: Yeah. So we have the bad guy who is there to buy it.
Host: Yeah.
Host: And everything goes sideways as you just described. Yeah. Probably assuming that it’s not for as much money as then we are at the the auction, which happens in the beginning of like the third act of this movie, right, where he is trying to buy that drive, then on the dark web for like $1 billion or something crazy, like.
Host: Right.
Host: Like maybe if they had just kept their heads about them and finished the deal at the beginning of the movie, everything would have been fine and he would have saved some money. But no, we have to like, have this dark web and you’ve got to be in a blind spot or a closed network or whatever. The, you know, the fun little technology.
Host: One of my favorite things in these kinds of movies is, yeah, the lengths they go to to describe the technology so that you don’t question it. So it’s like the dark web, and then we’ve got to get on a closed whatever. And you know, throw in quantum and you’re good to go. Basically what this is to me.
Host: So okay.
Host: Yeah. But that opening scene, it does it goes sideways and there is no reason it should logically have gone sideways.
Host: Yeah. Do you ever see that movie Triple Frontier?
Host: I don’t think so.
Host: On Netflix. I feel like we should watch this movie sometime, because it kind of does this, right where we’re in Colombia or someplace like Colombia, and there’s just crazy shootouts like this, but you can kind of tell what’s going on, and I feel like there’s a need for that establishing shot of an area where an action scene is about to happen.
Host: Kathryn Bigelow is incredible at this, especially in the her locker. You know, where everybody is and what’s happening, and you’re tracking with it and you’re feeling the tension. And this movie, the tension just goes out of the room because you really don’t understand what’s happening. And they’re cutting like every point eight seconds, you know?
Host: Yeah, I even say this in my real back of the box, the action feels dated and kind of a nostalgic way, so I liked it. But it’s not like of the time of where we are with action movies right now.
Host: Yeah, this movie came out in 2022, and the bummer is that Jessica Chastain, Diane Kruger, they’re doing some real stunts. They’re doing some real fistfights in this movie. They did some real choreography, and it’s ruined by the editing. I feel like I really wish they had left some of these shots, you know, running so they could do a couple of moves in one kind of John Wick style, because they were doing that, you know, adding kinetic energy to the movie by shaking the camera and cutting so quickly really kind of bummed me out, because Jessica Chastain is really doing like, the Lord’s work and jumping out of windows and stuff in this movie.
Host: And it also needs like the Christopher McQuarrie touch of, let’s just remind people where we are. You know, they have the ragtag crew. Yeah, put them in a room, you know, restate the plot. Okay, we’re in here. We’re going to do this, this and this. There’s a there’s a little of that when they get to wherever Singapore, wherever the auction is.
Host: Yeah.
Host: That’s really Shanghai. That’s really the only time they do that as they’re kind of going into it. And then of course, they get out of the limousines where they found $1,000 dresses. Right. And make up and.
Host: It’s Hobbs and Shaw shopping. Logic. Yeah.
Host: Exactly. It’s so ridiculous. And those are the moments I totally forgive movies like this. Like it just kind of.
Host: I mean, that happens to me. Mission impossible movie. Suddenly they have crazy suits and dresses and it’s like, yeah, that happens.
Host: Yeah, of course, but like, everything should work again. But it just is slightly off. Even their relationship between Jessica Chastain and Sebastian Stan never really feels like they want us to feel some depth of emotion or like that. Would they? Won’t they? Yeah. You think he’s dead for a good chunk of the first part of the movie and he’s used as a recruiting tool.
Host: You know, when she goes, oh, Nick’s dead or, you know, and that’s the hook to get Lupita Nyong’o to like, come along on the journey with them. Just like we haven’t seen any of this relationship. We don’t know if it’s a good relationship or not, you know? So again, it just misses the mark a little bit. And a couple of things that happened in that opening scene, action scene in Paris that I just adore in movies like this.
Host: So Jessica Chastain has a gun under a sundress.
Host: Yeah.
Host: She shoots like a chandelier. They’re like, try to drop on Diane Kruger. Like, yeah, the amount of like, she’s running. She shoots it so that it almost like drops on her. In theory, she could have just shot Diane Kruger because she’s that good of a shot.
Host: Right.
Host: And then you have disappearing behind a bus twice in this movie. So things like that. Again.
Host: Amazing.
Host: That’s where redeemed itself. It’ll throw those things in there and you’re like, I’m back in, I’m back.
Host: In, baby. I love how there are so many scenes in this movie where everyone is shooting all the time and no one, no one is hitting anything. Yeah, it’s always just the wall next to our characters. But then there are scenes where people are shooting in, in every shot that they do is so perfect. You know, they’re shooting down lamps like chandeliers or whatever.
Host: And like every single person in that one market scene, Jessica Chastain is just killing everybody she’s trying to kill with one shot.
Host: Yeah.
Host: But back to France. You know, just running around with a gun out. I’m sure that’s totally normal in France. No big deal.
Host: Totally normal. Yeah. Nobody screams. Nobody tries to tackle her.
Host: Yeah, exactly. Let’s listen to what it sounds like when these characters talk to each other, which is a lot of times the best parts. And, you know, these are the scenes where while they’re talking, I think, oh, that’s a good idea. How can they don’t pursue that idea at all? But here is Jessica Chastain trying to bring in Lupita Nyong’o.
Clip: Hope you don’t mind. I let myself in.
Clip: Getting into the room isn’t the same as getting in.
Clip: You didn’t ask the question and you didn’t ask the question because you don’t want to know the answer. Correct. The package is.
Clip: Here.
Clip: We go. A data key is that a cyber tools, exploit kits, worms, ransomware, you name it that can get into any closed system on the planet. The suite of tools is still out there and I need your help to track it down.
Clip: I haven’t heard I need to do this.
Clip: They killed Nick.
Host: So that’s all she needs to hear. And she puts the phone down. But here’s where it goes from there. They need to sell the weapon a little bit. Let’s hear what the weapon is.
Clip: You know those the old wars, cold war, more on terror. We knew who we were fighting. But now the enemy is invisible, like ghosts in a machine.
Host: So how often do you just give a solid simile like that while you’re describing things?
Host: All the time.
Host: Yeah. Okay.
Host: Okay. Yeah, yeah, totally. 100% of the.
Host: Time you do that like a similar machine.
Host: Yeah.
Host: Okay, great.
Clip: If they get their hands on this, they could control and destabilize entire city grids, nuclear facilities, world markets, anything from a plane in the sky to the phone in your pocket. You know, the kind of people beginning to get Ahold of this. And you know what they’ll do with it? They can control any part of the world from simple reach of their keyboard.
Clip: Everything you said on that stage was right. Everything except one thing.
Host: We should say that Lupita Nyong’o was just speaking at the Future Systems Convention. Is that what it was called?
Host: I think so, yeah.
Clip: The threat isn’t on the horizon. It’s here right now. They get this, they start World War three.
Clip: The war would be over before we could even fight back.
Clip: I cannot do this without you, Daesh. You’re the best in the world of what you do.
Host: You got to sell the dish.
Host: 100%. I’m playing this scene with the Dead Reckoning opening scene when they are in the Director of National Intelligence Office, and they’re all, like, facing him.
Host: Yeah, yeah.
Host: Talking about the entity. Yeah, that is one of those. And I don’t know if Christopher McQuarrie gets enough credit as a writer for that scene. Yeah, because it’s played for information. It’s played for like a little bit of a laugh because they’re kind of poking fun at itself of what kind of the Mission Impossible movies are, while also having a very similar conversation about a piece of technology that is doing the, you know, the same thing, and it’s awesome.
Host: You know, I have grown to love that movie. I just watched it again, like a couple.
Host: Of you did. Awesome. Yeah.
Host: And it’s one of those movies that has grown on me every time I’ve watched it. Like there’s still pieces of Hayley Atwell character that kind of drive me a little crazy, sure, throughout, but to pull off a scene like that where you’re setting the stage, you just have five actors, six actors in a room together. Yeah. Setting the framework for the movie, it is so skillfully done.
Host: Obviously you’re at the seventh Mission Impossible. It knows what it is. You’re kind of at the final, almost at the conclusion of the series. Yeah. Christopher McQuarrie, Tom cruise really know these characters, what they’re doing. So it’s a little bit of a different scenario, but to be able to pull off a scene where you’re looking, you’re kind of self-referential while also interesting and funny.
Host: Yeah, that’s a great scene. You know, if you talk about the three great scenes, that’s one of those scenes that I remember and I think of it as like it’s ridiculous and perfect in every way. And this scene is trying to emulate that in some sense. And it just like it’s like, Yeah, they killed Nick and it’s, you know, yes, we get it.
Host: We’re selling the bad guy, which is this piece of technology. Yeah, but it just feels silly in a sense of how like they’re taking it so seriously, and yet it feels so silly at the same time.
Host: We haven’t mentioned that Penelope Cruz is in this movie, and she is maybe the weakest link for me in this movie, in this cast. And she’s one of the best actresses alive on our planet. And yeah, she plays this therapist. I think she’s supposed to be our way in. You know, we’re seeing this world for the first time the way she is, and she’s scared to death.
Host: But her character just doesn’t work in this movie. And it’s so bizarre because she is so incredible. I wish that her character had been a bit more, I don’t know, onboard for the adventures, you know, it seemed like they were just trying to take care of her. The whole time she was a psychologist, she could have, like started getting in people’s heads a bit better.
Host: She just plays this super sweet, innocent person and it just kind of it takes you out of the movie a little bit.
Host: Yeah, I totally agree. Like how they shoehorned her in that character, like the, the conceit is the agent that stole the technology, which somehow magically ends up in France to sell it to, to, you know, whoever the CIA or the German intelligence to bring it back. The Colombian intelligence service send his therapist.
Host: Totally.
Host: And that’s how she enters the movie, but it totally falls flat. And they should have just made her a badass Colombian spy that’s coming together on this. And let that be the character instead of what it is, you know, because it does. It totally doesn’t work. Like of all the characters, that’s the one that works the least.
Host: Yeah. I feel like for a lot of the movie, I’m thinking, we need to speed this along. Penelope Cruz needs to get on board with this adventure like 30 minutes ago in this movie. But the rest of the movie, there’s so many things keep happening where I’m like, wait, what’s what’s happening here? This wasn’t set up at all.
Host: Yeah, but we also have to talk about Diane Kruger, who is a miracle in this movie and should be in every movie forever. Agree? She is so good in this movie, playing like a German, you know, spy and just she could say nothing in this movie and I would be entirely on board with her sad spy story that she’s showing on her face the whole movie.
Host: She’s so good in this movie.
Host: Yeah, I think she’s the only one who knew what movie she was in.
Host: Yeah, that’s a good point. Jessica Chastain was like, you know, swinging for the fences. Then Kruger was like, no, this is where we are right here. I feel like Lupita Nyong’o also. Well, she has to say some hilarious things in this movie. Wait, let’s listen to this. This is incredible.
Clip: This system is.
Clip: These algorithms.
Clip: Are beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Next generation zero day data sets, parallel infinity bit encryption systems.
Clip: I mean, so this.
Clip: Is poetic.
Clip: I’ll call it in.
Host: Next generation zero day something or other.
Host: Amazing infinity something encryption bit. Yeah I’m in.
Host: Yeah. She’s like the hacker. Yeah. We’re keeping our Odyssey theme alive. We watched The Martian last week because Matt Damon was coming on The Odyssey. The Odyssey is destroying the box office. In the last couple of weeks. Lupita Nyong’o plays two different characters in that movie.
Host: Awesome.
Host: Let’s do a little chapter of. What are you watching these days, Joe? What did you think of The Odyssey?
Host: I have not seen it yet.
Host: Yeah, I haven’t either. Okay, well, that was what we’ve been watching lately.
Host: Well, we haven’t been watching more, but.
Host: I mean, when Peter Nyong’o is in a frame in this movie, it is infinitely interesting. Like, her face just carries the film the same way that Diane Kruger does the two of them. This whole movie could be theirs as far as I’m concerned. Yeah, this movie could be a remake of Bad Boys as far as I know. And it stars the two of them, and we’re good to go.
Host: I mean, they are so good in this movie. I mean, there’s really just cinematic royalty in this movie. Yeah, I think that’s one of the reasons I’ll watch it every other year is just like, well, it’s interesting to see what the PD and Jago is up to in 2022, you know?
Host: Yeah, this movie reminds me, as I think about it, of I have this really bad guilty pleasure of procedural CBS TV shows. So like FBI, those kind of shows. And to me, the plot and like the characters could have been like a three episode crossover with, you know, the different Dick Wolf produced shows that are on which is like CIA and FBI and FBI whatever, you know, because the action scenes in those shows are so, okay, we’re seven minutes in now.
Host: We need the red herring action scene where we go this way. Yep. Now we need to get everyone together in a room to explain what’s happening. So they have the people at headquarters that are, you know, walking around and it’s hilarious to watch. I can almost watch them calling action as they get set. And that’s kind of where this movie.
Host: I had moments where I was like, am I? Watching a three episode arc on CBS on, you know, a show that’s going to be on for 200 years and, you know.
Host: Yeah, yeah.
Host: So to me, it’s it is sad because you have such potential again, it’s like, it’s all right there. Just grab it and something just it just it just misses. And again the misses are just as glorious for me now as the as when it lands.
Host: Well we have we have to blame a little bit that they weren’t able to fix this movie probably once they realized what was wrong with it. And that’s because they filmed this towards the end of 2019. And then reshoots happened in mid 2020. And so. Covid Covid is kind of to blame. And so there’s there are scenes in this movie where the cast is standing together, but they’re actually standing in front of green screens wherever they were living at the time in different spots.
Host: And Bing, Bing fan actually was in like jail when they were doing the reshoots of this movie because there was some tax thing that happened or something.
Host: Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, I remember vaguely.
Host: And so she’s in front of a green screen, like in prison or something in the reshoots of this movie, and apparently I didn’t catch it. But apparently when you watch it, you can kind of see that they’re all lit differently as they’re standing next to each other because they’re standing in different places in front of a green screen.
Host: So, you know, when they needed to go back and get a shot, they just kind of couldn’t. And man, that must have been brutal when they realized that in 2020. And then this movie came out in January of 2022 and they’re like, yeah, it is just what we could get. You know, that must have been brutal for them.
Host: Simon Kinberg did not do a press tour when this movie came out and failed the way he did with Dark Phoenix. He hasn’t really spoken about this movie very much since it came out that I could find.
Host: That’s interesting. I have this weird three year global pandemic and somehow I, you know, you forget how it just drastically affected how movies were being made, if at all, during that time.
Host: Yeah, yeah.
Host: That’s interesting. Now we want to watch it again to try to find that scene.
Host: I think that it still could have been fixed. I mean, there’s just, you know, some shots you could have put in a different order. And I feel like the scenes would have made more sense. Obviously, they can’t go back and get establishing shots when they can’t have like 20 people near each other in a shot. So I kind of wonder if that ruined some of the if they didn’t get those shots.
Host: And then they realized, oh, we can’t do it because people are not gathering in places right now. So yeah, it’s interesting, I love it. I love this movie. Yeah. Jessica Chastain is like jumping off buildings and climbing up cranes, and some of the fistfights in this movie are just clearly shot by the second unit. And they’re just they’re just amazing, you know?
Host: Yeah, that was fun. Also to see because there are some, especially the Diane Kruger when there and Jessica Chastain when they aren’t on the same team yet.
Host: Yeah, yeah.
Host: They have a great fight scene through the market, you know, and they have the crane and there’s some moments where it is so clearly stunt doubles hiding their face with, you know, a hoodie on or bad wig. Yeah. The wig department on this really went all out as well for. Yeah, I think Diane Kruger and Jessica Chastain both were like 2 or 3 wigs at different points that are just amazing.
Host: They’re not good, but it’s awesome. But that’s probably my favorite action scene is when they’re in the market and just there’s so many things happening. Yeah, it’s probably the one that lands the best for me.
Host: Yeah, it’s really good.
Host: Yeah. There’s just their moments. It does, I do. I feel like if they have this good of editors, then this is probably the best of what they could ring out of what they had.
Host: Yeah, I.
Host: Guess so. Which is saying something.
Host: Having said that, I love that we watch the 355.
Host: Yeah. Me too.
Host: Despite the fact that the whole time you watch this movie, you’re like, why is this movie called The Three?
Host: Yeah. Oh, thank God you have to wait till the final scene of the movie to find out.
Host: Which is just.
Host: What on Earth.
Host: What were they doing? It is not a fun reveal at that point. It’s just exhausting at that point. Yeah, yeah.
Host: Because especially because at that point you’ve had three different moments where you think you’re at the end of the movie and it’s like, oh, there’s one more scene. Oh no, we’re still going. And so by that point, you’re just like, okay, just put us out of our misery.
Host: Yeah.
Host: We’re two hours in.
Host: The movie actually kind of resolves like 50 minutes in. You think it’s over? There’s a moment where it’s like, wait, is that over? And I just, you know that. No, no no no, no, you feel like the credits are gonna roll, you know? Yeah. And then it happens again, like, 45 minutes later. Yeah. It keeps happening in this movie.
Host: Yeah. Yeah yeah. Again. So they at that 40 minutes mark, they get their hands on the technology. Yeah. And then they turn it over to the give us the room. The boss of the CIA.
Host: But he ended up being a bad guy right.
Host: Yeah. He ends up being a bad guy. But also it’s like the most powerful technology in the world. And just, like, just hands it to one guy by himself in the CIA office somewhere in Germany. Or France or wherever they are. We’re like, I might want a little bit more security around for this.
Host: Totally. Totally.
Host: Yeah. Then the Chinese get involved, which we find out are good. Yeah. And then they take it. But then I’m not quite sure why they’re trying to auction it off on the dark web, because that sets off the next part of, like, the second act of the movie.
Host: Because we need the auction. We need the Mission Impossible dress up auction. And it’s pretty fun.
Host: Well, then I’m back in.
Host: Yeah, but they keep going into these places where they’re just dudes, and it feels like. It feels like this movie is trying to comment on women where we would typically see dudes. There’s like an all dude bathhouse that somebody walks into, and there’s really nothing happens there except, you know, there’s just a place that she’s not supposed to be.
Host: Same thing with this oxygen. You know, there’s just all these rich jerks, but they speak to this a bit, which I found really fun. You know, like, we kind of get to go behind closed doors and hear what five lady spies would say about the dude fest that is these kinds of movies. And so let’s listen to a couple of those scenes.
Clip: I’m sorry that you’re here. This is my fault. The brutal of this in your life. No. You didn’t.
Clip: He did.
Clip: You don’t have to apologize for him, miss. We always do that, right? We think everything is our fault. You didn’t bring this into my life. All you did was trash the wrong guy. It’s not your fault.
Clip: That’s what they’re always say.
Clip: I’m not a therapist right now.
Host: Really? Lands that moment? Yeah.
Host: Didn’t you like loading a gun at that same time?
Host: I think so. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And then here’s Jessica Chastain and Lapita yoga talking.
Clip: What’d you tell him?
Clip: That I’d be a bit longer.
Clip: And what do you say?
Clip: He hasn’t.
Clip: Been sleeping well without me.
Clip: That’s real love,
Clip: That’s real life, mace.
Clip: James Bond never has to deal with real life.
Clip: James Bond always ends up alone.
Host: It’s a solid conversation. Yeah. Simon Kinberg saying that he co-wrote the script for this. And his thing was, I really want it to be that these are real people with real relationships, because we never see that. We don’t know who Ethan Hunt is. Although I guess the core throughout those movies was, you know, he couldn’t really have relationships and that was the tension.
Host: So but what if these people really did have connections with people outside? I thought that was interesting. I thought, that’s a good thing for a movie.
Host: Yeah, it deserved better in the presentation of it. But yeah, that’s an interesting idea.
Host: Well, Joe, as we’re talking about this, I am. I’ll be honest, I’m a wee bit worried that there are some people out there who may not have seen the January 7th, 2022 release of the movie. The 355.
Host: Yeah, weird.
Host: I know that seems pretty bizarre, but just in the off chance, you know, we have a vast audience across the entire planet, so there’s a chance they haven’t gotten to it. It’s on Netflix right now. Nobody deals. You have no excuses. So let’s pretend. Hold on. Can I say something? Can we. Can we have a little sidebar for a second?
Host: Absolutely. I love a sidebar.
Host: I’m a little bit worried that my description of the back of the box segment of our show has been getting a little bit too long.
Host: No.
Host: I think it’s hilarious. I think we should just kind of make it as long as possible.
Host: No no no no no no. I’m gonna make this as short as I can. So I just want to promise the listener. I’ve noticed it. I know you’ve noticed it. It’s time for this to get shorter. So here we go. Joe, I’m a little bit worried that there might be some people out there who have not seen the 355, so I think it’s time for us to pretend like we are walking through the halls of an old school video store.
Host: I’m talking about, like, what was the video store that you went to growing up?
Host: I mean, blockbuster is the one that jumps to mind, but I feel like there were a lot of independent ones. I remember when, way back in the 80s, when you rented the VCR at the same time, there was the beta and the VHS like distinction, like down the middle of the store.
Host: Totally.
Host: And you take it home and my dad would fend 30 minutes trying to hook it up and, you know, back in, you know, when things weren’t as simple. So I think, yeah, let’s let’s go way back to the 80s time when we’re looking at the back of the box.
Host: And I think. Iris was called Movieland, which is pretty much the best name for a place possible. Yeah. All right, so let’s pretend you’re going through the halls of movieland and you’re like, you know what? I don’t want a horror movie. I don’t want a comedy. Yeah, I’m going to go straight to action and adventure and see what’s going on over there.
Host: Actually. Hold up. This is a brand new movie, so I’m going to go to new releases. Obviously now there are a lot of VHS tapes. There are a lot of DVDs, Blu rays on the shelves. And as you’re walking down the shelves, you’re trying to see what is actually something you can, you know, rent. So I want to keep this quick.
Host: So you’re going you’re going through all the hallways. What’s next?
Host: Action adventure. New release. Action adventure.
Host: Obviously the action adventure. I mean, obviously the weird thing about the new releases section was it was just all of the movies. There was no sections in the new releases, it was just new releases. But you would know that it was in because the actual physical tape or DVD was behind the Fo box, right? So you could see the poster art, and then you could just flip this box right over and see, like a synopsis.
Host: And also, if you’re a Greg Swineherd, little Greg Swineherd is reading the the liner notes, reading who produced it, who wrote it, who directed it. That’s where this all came from for me. Boredom in a video store. But anyways, I want to cut to the chase here. Let’s pretend you’re walking down the hallways. Yes, of Movieland Concord, California.
Host: Obviously. Obviously it might have been Walnut Creek, I don’t know, I lived right on the border. And you’re flipping these boxes over. What’s this? It’s a movie called the three five, five. It has five of the best actresses on the planet Earth. This seems like it might be pretty good. You pick up that box. I want to read the back of that box to find out if it’s a movie I should rent tonight at Movieland.
Host: That’s right. It’s time for the back of the box.
Clip: It’s the back of the box.
Host: There’s a mad scramble to secure technology which can hack any system. While all of the world’s intelligence agencies are converging, so are those who would use this technology for harm or only hope. Is a ragtag crew of spies thrown together out of happenstance and a shared sense of duty to do the right thing. As the conspiracy is unraveled, who will be left standing and who can be believed?
Host: This movie effortlessly blends action and suspense while leave you guessing until the final scene.
Host: Wow. It seems a lot more mysterious than I felt while I was watching it, but I think that does get me in the door. I think I do rent it.
Host: Okay, sweet.
Host: Yeah. Oh, by the way, movieland also had like a box of movie posters that you could just take. Yeah, and so I decorated my whole room my whole childhood. I grabbed movie posters from. And I’m. I’m not even joking. I’m pretty sure this is why I’m a graphic designer. It’s because I just sat there and looked at movie posters my whole childhood, right?
Host: I think you also need some artistic talent, because I had movie posters.
Host: Growing up as well.
Host: And I can’t draw for anything.
Host: Everything looks like the Stand by Me poster and quote about cherry does.
Host: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Host: All right. Well, I think I rent it, but that’s obviously just the regular marketing back of the box, Joe. And that’s not what we’re here for. I don’t think anybody that press play on this episode is in it just for the marketing. They want the honest, true raw Joe Sky Tucker back of the box. What did you really think of this movie and what would it say on the back of the box?
Host: This movie brought everything to the table except a writer. This movie is so trope filled it seems that only A.I. could have written it. The cast is great, the action scenes feel a little dated, but in a in a nostalgic manner. Sadly, we have offensively boring dialog, which somehow becomes a hilarious character in and of itself. The cast and crew deserve better, but it is an enjoyable romp into what could have been.
Host: Love it. Okay. All right, Joe, should we get to the box office and critical response to this movie?
Host: Oh, I cannot wait.
Host: All right, Joe, I have great news and bad news. Great news for us. Bad news for other people. The great news is that this movie came out in January. In a January movie for us can only mean good things, because the movie doesn’t have to be all great. There could be some bad. So January 7th, 2022 this movie came out the budget for this movie.
Host: Actually. Let’s play. Can Joe guess the budget? What do you think the budget was on this movie.
Host: Made in 2019?
Host: Yep.
Host: Got a strong cast. I’m going to go 110 million.
Host: Wow wow 75 wow.
Host: Way off okay.
Host: Yeah they got it for a steal. Unfortunately, the domestic box office for this movie total was $14.5 million. Oh oh in the international was $13 million. So this made just shy of $28 million worldwide.
Host: Oh.
Host: So that’s a little rough.
Host: Leaving about 50 million on the table that they and they needed to double the. Yeah. So they’re in trouble and obviously streaming and full effect right now. So we don’t quite know. Needless to say it didn’t make enough money to engender anyone saying let’s make another three, five, five. Let’s make three, five, six. Basically, that’s not.
Host: How that’d be awesome.
Host: Yeah.
Host: Okay. Well, let’s get to what the critics said about this movie. What do you think the Rotten Tomatoes score is for critics for the 355 Joe.
Host: I mean, it feels like a 70 because we’re doing it right now.
Host: Yeah, it really does feel like a 70, doesn’t it? Because it’s like it’s pretty good. But then there’s stuff that isn’t so great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Host: But I can’t go. I’m going to go 43.
Host: 24.
Host: Wow.
Host: Maybe our lowest.
Host: It might.
Host: Be Rotten Tomatoes score movie we’ve ever done. Now we have over 1000 verified ratings from audience members on tomatoes, which shows that this movie. Super popular, not have much traction. But of those 1000 people or more, what do you think the popcorn meter is? What do you think the audience score is on Rotten Tomatoes?
Host: Joe I’ll keep my original answer. I’ll go 43.
Host: 86. What? Yeah. Wow. That’s why this movie is perfect for us. Because these are our people.
Host: That’s insane. These are. So you look at these numbers a lot more than I do. What? Where do you like to see in general? Like when you trust a popcorn meter and a and a rotten tomatoes. Like, how many do you like to see before you kind of trust it? Or it doesn’t feel like it could be swayed by bots or those sorts.
Host: Of things? Yeah, I want to see many tens of thousands, to be honest. So this isn’t a very good sample size, man. I was looking at the Odyssey audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes on Friday night in the Odyssey is just like everyone loves the Odyssey, right? Yeah, and it was just horrible review after horrible review. And a lot of them weren’t verified.
Host: And it was honestly like there’s an AI bot out there writing these right now. That just has to be. There’s no way. The last like 30 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes by audience members were half a star, you know.
Host: Right.
Host: Yeah. So it’s a loose science. We’ll just say that, says a guy who.
Host: Worked for a data science.
Host: It’s close enough.
Host: Some of the funniest things I’ve heard said about data science were in the marketing department of my company, were like, well, this is how it works. And if a data scientist is in the meeting, they’re like, that’s not how it works at all.
Host: Anyways.
Host: That’s awesome.
Host: Well, we like to start reading some reviews from the Seattle Times. The Seattle Times did not give this to Sorin or Moira, unfortunately. They ran an Associated Press review written by Lindsay Bar, and she writes for the New York Times now, actually.
Host: All right. Good for you, Lindsay.
Host: So in the Seattle Times, we got this review mostly. The 355 succeeds were others have come up short because it put the movie and the story first, not the message. Two and a half out of four stars.
Host: I agree with the number. I don’t know if I agree with the words.
Host: Okay, okay, let’s get straight to Kevin Maher, one of my favorite people to read. He writes for The Times UK. He is notoriously hot or cold about movies. What did he say about this movie? He said five thrillingly charismatic performance, A giddy central premise and a single memorable one liner can’t save this hotchpotch production from its ruinous inadequacies.
Host: One out of five wow.
Host: Feels a little harsh, but hodgepodge? Whatever could be a name for this show, so I’ll take it.
Host: All right, we did it. We found our first potential name for this show should have been Hotchpotch Production and Ruinous Inadequacies. All right, let’s get to some more reviews. Screen international says despite the Keep it open ending, it seems clear that Chastain has an idea and not a franchise, that Simon Kinberg works better as a producer than a director.
Host: Oh, I agree with all of that.
Host: Peter Travers says. What a bummer to kick off 2022 at the movies with a lame, gender flipped Mission Impossible, Chastain and her team of women warriors look ready to rip, so it’s a shame that director Simon Kinberg traps them in an empty, soulless mess.
Host: Wow. That’s I mean, that’s I feel like it’s a little harsh. Yeah.
Host: But also this, you know, maybe this is an episode from the podcast empty, soulless Mess. Yeah.
Host: Yeah, I like it.
Host: All right. Stephanie Zacharek in Time magazine in 2022 wrote, rarely has a spy thriller so much resembled a pile of ironing.
Host: I don’t get it, but I love that a pile of clothes that she needs to iron is in the loop. Yeah. All right. Alison Willmore in New York magazine. And Voelker says its dullness somehow feels worse than grand failure.
Host: As though its aims were only to prove that a bunch of the most famous women on earth can come together to make an action film just as uninspired and boring as men can.
Host: Okay. That is a great review.
Host: All right. Johanna Schneller of Globe and Mail wrote, I was pleasantly entertained watching these chicks wheel around and elbow men in the throat, especially Kruger, who obviously could kill me without breaking a sweat.
Host: Yeah.
Host: Mike LaSalle. We’ve read a lot of really good reviews by Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2022. He wrote, the 355 is a guilty pleasure only don’t waste your time feeling guilty. Two and a half out of four stars.
Host: I was trying to think if there’s a name in there that might be a stretch, but a guilty pleasure that you don’t feel guilty about. I mean, that’s how I want people to feel about this podcast, so I’ll allow it.
Host: But don’t waste your time feeling guilty.
Host: Yeah.
Host: Owen Gleiberman and Variety said mostly holds your attention.
Host: I beg.
Host: Periodically revs the senses and gives its actors just enough to work with to put a basic feminine spin on the The Observer UK, says Diane Kruger, slapping Jessica Chastain across the face with a frozen fish. Should be funny. Two out of five stars.
Host: It’s awesome.
Host: All right, just two more here. We’ve got the independent UK saying perhaps that’s true. Equality in action. An international, diverse cast of actresses can now make a mediocre spy film two out of five stars. And one of my favorite reviewers, Amy Nicholson, writing for The New York Times, says it’s flat footed, even when the setups yearn to be playful, like a pursuit that detours into a men only bathhouse or a surreal moment in an undercover sequence when Chastain rips off her red wig disguise to reveal her own identical red hair.
Host: C-minus.
Host: Yeah.
Host: Those are. I mean, I can’t argue with any of those reviews. They are dead on for the most part.
Host: It’s pretty rough.
Host: Yeah.
Host: All right, Joe, should we get to drinking games?
Host: Absolutely. Let’s do it again. It can be water, alcohol, a beer, wine, smoothie, coffee, whatever you want. You know, so we start with our stock drinking games, which this opens with. Now what I’m calling the Greg’s Fine Art special. Silent helicopter, the first shot. We have trees and then a helicopter just out of nowhere.
Host: The greatest, the greatest.
Host: Never again do we see this helicopter.
Host: We.
Host: We don’t have, like, a shot where they’re like the the commandos in the in the jungle and the helicopters behind them. Yeah. Don’t worry about it.
Host: Don’t you dare worry about it.
Host: Yeah. Push in and enhance. Oh, all over this movie. Yeah. Facial recognition software all over it. We might have to add, like, a special trophy for facial recognition and all of that. We’ll get to that. We don’t really have a slow motion look in the middle of chaos, but we do have an explosion with silent suffering and ringing in the ears.
Host: Flashes back to dialog. Two minutes are not necessarily two minutes ago, but almost two minutes ago. CGI. There’s some. There are moments when you can tell there in front of green screens. Yeah, great. Bad shots are everywhere.
Host: Everyone is right there. How are they missing them? Yeah, that’s a great bedroom.
Host: Yeah, exactly.
Host: Yeah.
Host: Streets are inexplicably wet. Absolutely. Oh, my.
Host: God. So often they look great.
Host: So great.
Host: I can’t argue with it.
Host: Yep. Literally says give us the room. Oh my God. Like, the joy that I felt in that moment is indescribable.
Host: You know what’s amazing is when you actually say, hey, guys, can we get the room in real life just to see what people would do? I’ve started doing this in real life just to see what happens. And it is. I’m just like you say it. They kind of look at you and you just go. I’ve always wanted to say that.
Host: Never mind. Yeah, yeah. Everyone gets it. Everyone gets it. Yeah.
Host: Yeah. Awesome. And we have no Interpol, which is a missed opportunity with thinking a movie like this. Interpol would make some sort of appearance. Yeah. And then our last drinking game, which we is probably the one that we have the least, but is one of my favorites. We have two different cell phone smashes in this movie, and it was great.
Host: The last one, I think it was Jessica Chastain with her high heel smashing through. Yeah. It was so good. And Sebastian Stan does it earlier in the film. So those are our stock drinking games. Paste yourselves with them because there’s a lot in there for anyone who’s got those. Maybe pass them along to the person left however you want to divvy them up.
Host: Go do your thing. But now my favorite part. Craig Swineherd, what is your first bespoke drinking game for the three, five, five?
Host: Anytime we have a montage of preparing weapons, take a drink.
Host: That’s so good. I might also need to be a trope, you know. Sure. So many I have every time people are actually shot and they kind of like a bad 80s movie, like jerk and fly around and, like, make a big and then they just, like, get shot and then kind of just collapse and you never see them again.
Host: Yeah. Drink.
Host: Anytime someone is punched and just falls on the ground and is no longer a problem in the scene. Take a drink.
Host: Awesome. I have any time. They’re in a chase and they push people down to get out of the way.
Host: Of, like.
Host: Yeah, 100%. Anytime the camera is over something, anytime we’re having, like, a straight down to earth shot, which happens a few times in this movie. Take a drink.
Host: Awesome. I also have one, but it’s more of the swooping camera where they, like, are spinning around and like, you know, they have the scene where there it’s like the hero shot where they’re spinning around them.
Host: Like the Michael Bay.
Host: There’s some scenes with like, yeah, with Sebastian Stan and them where like the camera and and then like Lupita Nyong’o, the camera is just constantly moving around them. And I’m not quite sure why, but I’m here for it.
Host: Yeah. Was there a scene where they’re eating dinner? And it’s basically the opening of that show? Roseanne? Yes. Or the Conners?
Host: Yeah.
Host: Yeah. It’s. Someone needs to take that scene and put, like, the opening music to a sitcom on it. That’s awesome. Maybe we should do that and put it on great bad movies.
Host: We might need to.
Host: By we, I mean you. Obviously, I’m going to need five versions of that on my desk by 5 p.m.. Five by five. Okay. Okay. All right. Anytime someone’s head hits an object, like a table or a sink or a counter or a wall.
Host: That’s so good. That happens so much in this movie. Pace yourself. Drink water in between every other. Yeah, I have anytime. Jessica Chastain wrapped something around someone’s neck in a fight.
Host: Take a drink. That’s great. Any time a bad guy says. How very disappointing. Take a drink.
Host: Amazing. I have anytime someone calls home, take a drink.
Host: Wow. That’s solid. That’s really good. Anytime someone says you’re good at everything except taking orders.
Host: Oh, my God, that almost should be a trope. Because I feel like that’s like every lieutenant in, like, an 80s. You know, buddy cop film says something like that. I have a second to the wrapping. Something around someone’s neck. Anytime. Jessica Chastain I think Diane Kruger does this to grabs the legs of someone while fighting and trips them.
Host: Take a drink.
Host: It’s a good move. It’s a good move. Take a drink anytime someone says the device.
Host: Yes, absolutely. That’s awesome. Anytime someone’s wearing a wig, take a drink. It’s great. Or takes it off? I’ll Jessica Chastain.
Host: Take a drink. Any time a plane just suddenly falls out of the sky. Attaches.
Host: Awesome. Any time Jessica Chastain and Sebastian Stan kiss, take a drink.
Host: Oh, yeah. Anytime a scene takes place in a CIA safe house, take a drink.
Host: I feel like that was a Covid influence of. Oh, we need some set pieces. So we need a place to be so that they can kind of. We can film each person not in the same at the same time. So.
Host: And it has the double win of making you want to watch safe House with Ryan Reynolds and Denzel Washington, which is a classic.
Host: Always classic. You may need to watch it. We need that to be on our list soon because that’s so good. Yeah. Every time you think Sebastian Stan is dead, take a drink.
Host: Anytime someone jumps from a roof to a roof or a container to a container. What do you prefer, Joe? Do you prefer jumping roofs or containers?
Host: I think roofs, containers. Seems a little. You know, you don’t have holds and, you know, you almost fall down like she needed a net on this one, so. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Have any time. Jessica Chastain character is called a tough guy. Take a drink.
Host: Oh. That’s great. I’m out. What else do you have?
Host: Oh, yeah, I’m out too. I was perfect.
Host: Nailed it. All right, Joe, that’s all well and good. But you know what? There are things in a movie that make it add up to a great bad movie. And those things are often listed in Ratatat fashion by you, Joe Sky Tucker. So that’s right. It’s time for Joe’s Trop Lightning Round, aka signs. You might be watching a great bad movie.
Host: Lightning round may feel a. Little less descriptive because there are so many tropes here. I will also note that I have added two three, four five new tropes based on this movie alone. Wow. So we have a new trope of a shot through a sniper scope. They have that in the opening scene. Like the helicopter. There is not, again, a sniper rifle used or a sniper.
Host: No one is shot with a sniper rifle. We just have one shot through. The sniper scope is awesome. A shot of multiple passports of someone like going through their bag and picking out their identity. All. Every movie we’ve ever seen. Basically, it’s a new trope eating takeout out of a Chinese restaurant box. New trope throwing things over while on a chase on foot.
Host: So like knocking down, you know, postcard holders and whatever and tables. Love it. And then I finally added Hobbs and Shaw travel logic to our tropes because we just.
Host: Need that.
Host: So yeah, those are the new tropes. Okay, now we can get to the lightning round. We have a room full of guns. We have beautiful women who can get in anywhere. We have sound effects on things that don’t make sound. So hacking in this movie, and the makes a sound that the name of the movie is said by a character.
Host: We have a ragtag crew finding the keys to the or under the visor kind of trope. Yeah, the person who is about to be killed. So we have Jessica Chastain. Character is about to be killed by Sebastian Stan, and then that person is shot by the therapist in that scene.
Host: Penelope Cruz.
Host: Yeah. Color filters on third world countries all over the place where you have revenge as the driver of the protagonist, sort of out of retirement. We have a friend and family who dies early in the film. If you kind of believe Sebastian Stan is dead early in the film. Duffel bag full of money, amazing recovery time, medical care from a loved one, partner and, you know, stapling themselves up, clothes that fit perfectly, that they just find randomly downloading a file under pressure, checking if a gun is loader loaded, call trace timer, and one of my personal favorites that happens twice, disappearing behind a bus.
Host: In fact, the last scene last shot of the movie is Jessica Chastain character disappearing behind the bus.
Host: And so great.
Host: That’s one of my favorites. And we have the helicopter. So we have it opens and closes with two of our favorite shots ever in a. Movie at just, you know, bookmarked in the middle. That’s perfect.
Host: Yeah. How can you go wrong? Strong start and strong finish. Who cares what’s in between?
Host: Exactly. It’s great all around.
Host: All right, Joe, as we’ve been talking about this movie for much longer than I anticipated, we would talk about the three five.
Host: Still, somehow we are dancing around the most sensitive issues. There are some elephants in the room that we have been avoiding in this conversation. I’ve had it. It’s time for important questions.
Host: Let’s get.
Host: To it. Did this movie hold up in 2022?
Host: Sort of.
Host: And does it hold up now?
Host: I in a way it holds up a little bit better to me. Yeah. Because I, I am coming to your side of things where it’s like if you said, let’s watch this movie, I’d be.
Host: Like, I will be.
Host: There in two seconds. Let’s go.
Host: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joe, how hard do they sell the bad guy in this movie? I mean.
Host: Who is the bad guy? Besides, they really sell the technology. You played that clip earlier of, like, what it is, but yeah, they struggled to kind of land on who the actual bad guy is. I guess the bastion stand, but they don’t really besides the technology, they don’t sell the bad guy very much at all in this.
Host: Yeah, they kind of sell the MacGuffin, I guess. Yeah. Okay. Joe, does this movie deserve a sequel?
Host: Deserve. Probably not. What? I watch a sequel? Yeah, yeah, 100%.
Host: I think that they make a sequel to this eventually. Yeah. It’s like how Practical Magic is getting a sequel. It’s like 20 years from now, everybody comes back together because it became a cult favorite on Netflix. Okay, but does it deserve a prequel?
Host: This is one I would allow where I would just like show me their their early careers. Any one of them pick any one of the the five? Yeah. And let’s do a one off for them. Yeah. So I would totally fine with with a prequel on this.
Host: So individual prequels for all five of them.
Host: Yeah. Culminating in the 355. How do we divide that by I’m trying to, you know, divide it all of it by five. And then each movie is.
Host: Listen, I was in the impression there would be no math in this episode.
Host: Yeah. Sorry.
Host: Okay, well, I feel like you’re still dancing around. The real answer here there is. The uncomfortable truth is that we need to go all the way back to the times of George Washington and see a prequel about the actual agent. 355 that we learned about in, like, the final scene movie. Yeah.
Host: I’m 100% in on that. Yes, that is the movie we need.
Host: I just assume that everyone listening to this has watched this movie 20 times, but in the off chance that they haven’t. Can you explain to our audience who agent 355 was.
Host: It was, I’m assuming, the first female spy of the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. The first women spy, and they didn’t know her name, and so they just named her agent. 355.
Host: So apparently George Washington would write letters in with code, and a 355 was a female agent. She’s only mentioned once in his letters, and he was going to attend a party with 355. And we don’t exactly know who that was, but there’s actually a prequel series that was on AMC in like 2014, I want to say, which actually starred like Jamie Bill and Heather Lind.
Host: And it was on AMC. So it’s called Turn Washington’s Spies. And so we get to see who agent 355 was in that. So we kind of already have a prequel AMC show probably was pretty good if it was on AMC back then. Yeah, but I think it’s time to get this off the small screen. It’s time for us to make a real movie about agent three five, five.
Host: Yeah. Why? Why isn’t that the movie they made? I mean, Jessica Chastain is Agent three five, five in the Revolutionary War. I mean, I’m I watched that every single time.
Host: Yeah, yeah. When she announces why it’s called the 355 at the end of this movie, I’ve, I’ve forgotten that it’s called the 3 or 5 five until the end. And then I’m angry that it’s called the 355 every time the credits roll in this movie.
Host: Yeah.
Host: Because why do we just learn that at the end? That’s a weird reveal in the final moments, just conversationally. It just does not hang together very well.
Host: No. I mean, there could have been a scene in a museum earlier in the film where their meeting and there’s a dead drop, and like, they could have dropped some breadcrumbs along the way.
Host: Hundred percent. Yeah. You know, there should have been a plot point, not just, hey, you know how this movie is called the 355? Do you want to know why? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, Joe, next important question. How can this movie be fixed? AKA who should be in the remake?
Host: I keep the cast. Yeah, I want a different writer, and I you mentioned it earlier. I would watch anything. Kathryn Bigelow. Drax. Yeah. She has this incredible ability to build tension. I don’t even understand how she does it. You know, when we watched House of dynamite, the opening scene of that is just someone calling home and how it shot.
Host: I don’t fully understand it, but like, yeah, instantly I’m in. I know I’m in good hands with a good director, and I can feel the tension in every scene. And she is the master of that. Like, if she’s in control of this movie, it’s a it’s a different movie and it’s a tight spy thriller start to finish. So that’s that’s who I would want.
Host: How do you fix this movie or who do you want in the remake?
Host: I think I recast everybody. I think they learned some things and I want them to have another time up to bat. I probably change Penelope Cruz’s character. Yeah. Unless she was super happy with it and feels like she can improve upon it, I would trust her judgment on that. I definitely wouldn’t have. Simon Kinberg directed. I don’t think he is ready.
Host: I think in a couple of movies he will be ready. But I think we give it to Gina Prince-Bythewood and she makes it for Netflix with a huge budget with that old guard money, you know? And I think she does a better job making this movie. She loves James Bond movies. You know, she loves James Bond movie, she loves Mission Impossible movies.
Host: She would love a crack at this. I just don’t understand why it was Simon Kinberg the more I think of it. So that’s how I fixed this movie. Everybody gets the same shot. I think there’s probably another pass on the script. There were lots of seemingly important things that were not really set up, like how they were getting ready to break into that hotel room in Shanghai from like, above and below.
Host: They’re going to blow. Yeah. And they weren’t quite ready. And so then they were rushing them and it was like, well, hold on, what’s this whole plan? What are we doing here?
Host: Yeah.
Host: It was just like there were there were no stakes because we had no idea what they were up to. So I think we give that a rewrite. I could keep going, but I think that’s it, that those are the big those are the main things. Next important question, Joe. Why is there romance in this movie?
Host: Well, there’s not a lot of romance in this movie, which is to its credit, I think it’s to show the dysfunction of of of Sebastian Stan. Maybe the conceit of this whole movie is if you have a, you know, a relationship where no one can kind of commit, maybe you should just walk away, you know, instead of trying to make it work because he’s he’s trying to make it work.
Host: She’s kind of in she’s kind of out. Yeah. You know, so maybe it’s a it’s a parable for today’s, you know, toxic relationships that we’re in. You know, that’s probably way more depth than this movie deserves. But there’s not a lot of romance, so I can’t I can’t fault this movie for that.
Host: I think this movie has the wrong amount of romance. I think it either has more. We either believe their relationship deeper or it’s just out and there’s no romance at all in this movie. I could go either way, but it is the wrong amount. Yeah.
Host: Yeah, I think it’s either you see that they have a deep love for each other and then there’s a break as he’s like chooses bad, you know, evil over good, or there’s a tension between them that they never realize that just as like drives their characters, you know. So there’s like a will they won’t they. But they don’t.
Host: That drives the tension but.
Host: Keep it. Subtext.
Host: Whatever it was, they picked the wrong lane on this one for sure. So.
Host: All right, Joe, are we bad people for loving this movie? Do you love this movie? You probably don’t love this movie.
Host: I don’t love this movie, but I don’t feel like a bad person. I wouldn’t feel like a bad person for loving this movie. I like this movie. I enjoyed watching this movie and I don’t. I don’t have the same sense of guilt I do about some of the movies we watch.
Host: So let me let me rephrase this question, because I feel like it’s it’ll be helpful if you meet someone at a party and they say, my favorite movie is the 355, is that the best thing a person could say to you at a party is might be. So that makes you an awesome person if you love this movie in my mind, yeah.
Host: Because then I’m like, have I got a podcast.
Host: For you?
Host: All right, Joe, next important question. What album is this movie?
Host: Oh, I spent so much time. I even look back at what I had for the last time. I will reveal that also in our bonus episode of what my album was, what I came to was I wanted an album that was kind of had good people attached to it. Yeah, but what I felt like was kind of trite writing, and when I came to is this is blink, blink 182, enema of the States.
Host: Yeah.
Host: Yeah, they’re kind of big popular album. I don’t like blink 182. I don’t dislike them as people or as a band. I just it doesn’t resonate with me. It’s like that poppy punk. It’s not my thing. I’m not a punk person, but pop punk is even worse to me. And just like the Triton of the lyrics to me and the tribe of the of the writing in this or the the parallels.
Host: But what about you? What album is this for you?
Host: That’s a great album, except when it isn’t. And that’s also how I would describe the three five, five. Yeah. So I wanted to do like an all female supergroup for this because that’s kind of what this movie is, unfortunately, like, this movie isn’t entirely successful, and the only all female supergroup that I wanted to mention was was like amazingly successful.
Host: So there isn’t really like a 1 to 1 here. So let’s pretend that the 355 was the most successful movie of all time. And I’m going to say that this is The Highwomen, which is the supergroup with Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires.
Host: Oh, wow.
Host: And it’s like, what if there was an all woman supergroup country supergroup that was the complement to The Highwaymen, which was Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. Right. And they’re amazing. I feel like you could listen to any highwaymen song, and it’ll be the best day of your life. So I feel like that’s what the 355 was going for and didn’t succeed.
Host: I feel like that’s what the high women went for and hit it out of the park. So this is the highwayman.
Host: Awesome, awesome. It’s giving, giving this movie something to aspire to be.
Host: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. All right Joe, it is finally, finally come down to this. It’s time for us to rate this movie. We have our scale. Great bad movie, good bad movie. Okay, bad movie, bad bad movie, and awful bad movie. How do you rate 2022 355?
Host: I have a strong affection for this movie. I can’t really rate it higher than an okay bad movie. In my mind, it’s right on the edge of good bad movie. Okay, yeah, so it’s really close. I can’t push it over that edge at this moment. I want to, but I just I can’t, but it’s it’s really close. I wouldn’t fault anyone for their love of this, but it’s an okay bad movie to me.
Host: How do you rate this movie?
Host: It’s. I agree with you. It’s right on the line. I think you know exactly what I’m going to do right now. Yeah, this is a good, bad movie. It’s a good, bad movie. So we will celebrate that line. I’m right there with you, though. I think we’re in the we’re hanging out in the same ballpark right now.
Host: Absolutely. Yeah. We’re definitely margin of error apart on this for sure.
Host: So yes.
Host: If standard.
Host: Deviation totally want to watch this movie again, right?
Host: Yeah.
Host: Me too. Yeah. Me too.
Host: This is a movie I think that would benefit from watching with a group of people so that you can kind of laugh at the ridiculousness of it, because, yeah, when those moments happen in you’re alone, you’re just kind of left a little flat. But when you’re with another person to be able to look at them and go, are you kidding me?
Host: That’s the best part of these.
Host: So here’s something that makes me laugh every time I’m watching a show or a movie with people, it’s when something stressful is happening and somebody says, are you okay? And the other person says, yeah, which happens in this movie. And it makes me laugh so hard. I want to play that part of this scene.
Host: Let’s do it.
Clip: Can you get another angle in here?
Clip: It’s a blind spot.
Clip: Can you get a satellite or something? So we can.
Clip: See in the definition of blind discount.
Clip: See if you knew exactly what it.
Clip: Are you okay?
Clip: Yeah.
Host: I’m so sorry to all of our listeners for pointing this out, because now you’re going to notice that this happens in just about everything you watch. It’s the dumbest thing that happens in film and television. Are you okay? Yeah, it happens all the time. And it’s so stupid.
Host: Yeah. My favorite line in there is when she’s like, you know, they’re in a blind spot and she’s like, can you get things like the definition of blind as you can’t see? Like, that’s the best line in the whole movie. Quite frankly.
Host: It gets very Aaron Sorkin ish right there. Yeah. As well as you didn’t ask the question earlier. Yeah. Well, Joe, guess what?
Host: Did we do it.
Host: We did it.
Host: Awesome. We had the conversation that people have been clamoring for. About the three.
Host: Five, five.
Host: Is the conversation that need to be high, and it’s awesome.
Host: Some people who listen to this show when they see an episode, they’re like, I’ve never heard of this one either. And I bet that’s going to be the reaction to this episode.
Host: But we enjoyed it and that’s what matters. And you’ll enjoy this episode, I hope. And I just want to shout out our amazing editor, Sam Cunningham, new father. So he needs some work. So if you if you need need an introduction and he’s looking for some additional side projects to work on to edit your podcast, he’s amazing. He makes us sound so much more coherent than we actually are.
Host: If you heard our rough cuts versus what our final version is, you’d probably be shocked at how how coherent we are in this. But shout out to Sam. Thank you for all the work you do on this. He is probably the biggest Christopher Nolan fan we know, so I’m wondering how many times he has seen the Odyssey new baby at home?
Host: Probably just once would be my guess, but if it’s as good as everyone says it is, maybe he’s seen it twice. So what do you think, Greg? This could be the taking over everywhere. How many times has Sam Cunningham seen The Odyssey since it came out?
Host: By the time this drops, I think he has seen it once, but only because he had to bail on the second time because something came up. Okay. Yeah. Is there a 70mm Imax in Kentucky?
Host: I don’t know. That’s a good question.
Host: He might need to fly out here so we can all go see another.
Host: All right. So dear listeners, if you want to help us fly Sam.
Host: Out here.
Host: We’re.
Host: Going.
Host: To need some revenue.
Host: How do you feel about babysitting, listener. Yes.
Host: We’re we’re starting a Kickstarter to fly Sam out here.
Host: Well, yeah, 100%. Joe and I could not agree more because when you when you really kind of take a step back and really take an honest look at Sam, you just have to. Oh my gosh, Joe, I just noticed the time. I’m so sorry. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Listen, this has been great, but so great. I just realized that my zero day data set is the last generation zero day data set.
Host: And I need to upgrade that to a next, next generation zero day data set ASAP. So I better go.
Host: Yeah, yeah. That track that tracks. I’ve got to go. My therapist from Columbia is here. So it’s from it’s time. Time for that session.
Host: That’s crazy. I mean maybe we could like share an Uber or something because I’m going to go about 150 miles south of Bogota, Colombia. Oh, I hear they have this, you know, drive thing that can control everything. I don’t know. Oh, yeah. It’s my friend’s kid. I don’t really know if it’s a real thing.
Host: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I really need to go make sure Sebastian Stan is dead. Because I think he’s probably not. But I think he is. He might be.
Host: You definitely want to double check that.
Host: Yeah, I got a.
Host: Double check. Well, that works for me, because actually, looking at the time, I really need to head out to the Future Systems convention because it’s in Vegas this year. Oh, yeah. You know, when it’s late July, there’s only one place I want to go on the planet, and it is Las Vegas, Nevada.
Host: Absolutely. Now that makes total sense. And listen again. So great. But yeah, I’ve got to run. Yeah, yeah. So good. There’s an auction and a gala on the dark web, so I’m going to go get dressed up for that. Should happen.
Host: Okay. Yeah. Okay.
Host: Yeah.
Host: That works for me because as you know, I’m professionally a lamp hanger. And I swear, this one lady keeps shooting down the lamp that I’m putting up by shooting the. I don’t know how she’s doing it. She’s missing everybody else. Yeah, as I can tell. But she keeps shooting down my lamp, so I better go.
Host: That track that tracks I. I’ve got to go. I’ve got a lot of work to do, and I’m going to go find a blind spot to do some work in, so you know. So I’ll be if you need me, that’ll. That’s all be okay.
Host: That works for me because I’m trying. I swear I had, like, multiple containers of Chinese food on this table, but all I see are bullets and guns and maps right now. Yeah, so I better go.
Host: Might be the best part of that whole.
Host: The movie.
Host: Is that shot, that establishing shot. Listen. Yeah. This has been great. I’ve got to go to I’ve got to go have a very dark conversation about the first time I kill someone, but also kind of dressed up as, like, a point of connection and levity with all these other killers. So. Yeah, let’s do that.
Host: Yeah. You know, kind of hitting a little close to home that scene, because I need to go turn in my dad by. Okay.
Host: Listen, this has been great, but soon.
Host: All right, well, that works for me. So, Joe, thanks for watching the three, five, five. And I will see you soon. See you soon.