Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?

No matter how many times Hollywood tries to push them on us, these films with woke messaging bomb at the box office over and over again. These mistakes cost studios and the companies that back them millions and millions of dollars and yet they continue to pump out these expensive movies, paying giant losses all in an effort to roll out “the message.”

This time, the delivery system for “the message” was the movie The 355, an all-female action spy flick that had all the boxes for a woke film checked off. It had a diverse cast of women all looking like runway models who can kick the crap out of men two to three times their size. The men are all idiots, significantly weaker, or just plain evil. It’s got characters that pass the Bechdel test. It’s got representation for days.

What it doesn’t have, despite all the talent in the film, is any charm or originality. In fact, just by going off the trailer, you may have gotten the impression that you’ve seen this movie before.

And it’s because you have. The all-female ass-kickers flick is about a dime a dozen, especially nowadays. Few people enjoyed those kinds of movies in the past, and even fewer do today. The film is considered one of the worst box office bombs according to Collider:

Registering one of the worst-ever openings for a film its size, writer-director Simon Kinberg’s globe-trotting spy movie The 355 is expected to make $4.3 million in its debut weekend, which is good enough only for a third place finish. Conservative estimates had put the film’s opening at between $5 million and $7 million, but this is a terrible result for a film playing in over 3,000 theaters and featuring the sort of cast that it does.

Searching for excuses here helps little. COVID can’t be blamed as Spider-Man: No Way Home is still doing gangbusters.

(READ: ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ Review — Easily One of the Best Films of the Year)

There is a myriad of reasons why these films fail. For one, action movies are typically enjoyed by men and when you have a movie telling men that they’re inferior, evil, or weak, then you’ve stripped half the population from your audience. This is pretty bad already since a good deal of women won’t be all that interested in seeing an action movie in the first place, at least not without a man.

Then there’s the issue with “the message.” Even if a film doesn’t outright throw the message in your face, it’s lurking around in the background, making the film seem more like high-production-value propaganda than a film worth seeing.

Then there’s the believability factor. Many people are willing to suspend their disbelief for many things, but the likelihood of women who clock in at under 100 lbs beating up men hovering around 200 lbs is incredibly low. What’s more, we can see it in the film as men who are clearly faster and stronger seem to reduce both of these assets as these women punch, kick, and do all the acrobatics around them that make these movies happen. It takes people right out of the action.

If the movie wasn’t taking itself as seriously, this would fly. Watching Gal Gadot do it in a superhero movie was fun. Watching Scarlette Johanson do it as Black Widow was always pretty great, but these were superhero movies where suspension of disbelief was necessary. The 355 doesn’t have that luxury. In fact, it goes so far as to reject it, forcing people to just accept that this is just possible.

Anything is possible, but probable is a different story, and woke films are, at their core, massively improbable. Be it the action to the way people act, to the way people think, it just doesn’t ring true to people.

It’s a wonder how many more times movies like these will be made before Hollywood figures it out.

Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?