It’s always a little suspect when too much is made of a big action movie being “female-fronted.” Unfortunately, Hollywood has decided lately that in course correcting for decades of gender inequity in certain genres that it’s not enough to just make an action-packed movie starring more than one woman: They must let the audience know that they know that this is A Girl Power Moment.
And frankly, whether it’s the lady Avengers assembling in “Infinity War,” a montage of Girls Doing Sports and Science in the latest “Charlie’s Angels,” or all of “Ocean’s 8,” it’s never not insulting to its purported audience.
There have been subtler, cleverer and just plain better efforts at bringing women to the forefront of so-called male genres (from “Widows” to “Spy”), but it’s hard not to go into something like “ The 355,” which has been written about as a female “Jason Bourne” meets “Mission: Impossible” for over four years, a little wary. We’ve been burned before, no matter how many Oscar nominees are on the poster.
