Red Sparrow - Review

Red Sparrow

Academy Award Winner Jennifer Lawrence, Australian actor, director and writer Joel Edgerton (“Warrior” and “Loving”) and Oscar winner Jeremy Irons star in Director Frank Lawrence’s contemporary spy thriller called “Red Sparrow”.

At the start we see Prima ballerina Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) a rising star in her national dance troop who during a performance suffers an injury that ends her dancing career leaving her with a bleak and uncertain future. And it’s during the months after her recovery from surgery her uncle Ivan Egorov (Matthias Schoenaerts) who works for the state secret police informs her that she won’t have much longer to live in the state subsidized apartment nor receive the premium medical care her mother receives for her chronic illness. He does however offer her an opportunity to keeping her benefits a while longer if she does a favor for him regarding getting some information from a wealthy Russian oligarch the state is suspicious about. Knowing it will probably mean having sex with him she reluctantly agrees.

But something else dramatically happens leaving her unnerved and betrayed by her uncle. Still her uncle saw great potential in her helping him with the clandestine assignment and suggest to her to consider starting a new career working for the state secret police by going to the “Sparrow School”, a super-secret intelligence service that trains exceptional young men and people to use their minds and bodies as weapons.

Through trial and error Egorova starts to emerge as one of the more dangerous Sparrows after completing the sadistic training process. She is soon sent to the field to spy and gain critical information on an American CIA spy named Nathan Nash (Joel Edgerton) who escaped the clutches of the Russian police to Budapest who they suspected was working with a senior treasonous mole inside Russian intelligence.

REVIEW: Running 2:20 minutes the look and action of the first 40 minutes was brilliant, filled with real spy master intrigue, dramatic tension and atmospherics all draped in the red colored gorgeous exteriors some common to Russian decor and culture. But it is shortly after Lawrence character goes to Sparrow School that the film starts to get bogged down structurally with its skirting the boundaries between what is sex with endless scenes of sadistic, bloody, violent behavior including overt pornographic role playing to showcase how much one must be willing to endure as harden strip down trainees completely devoid of any human emotions to becoming the ultimate weapon of human sexuality.

After the story moves from the class room to spying for real in the field it gets laden with a lot of scenes of Lawrence’s “Dominika Egorova” spending a lot of time just walking about in streets and buildings, staring suspiciously at random people, looking up, around and underneath and simply moving from room to room making the story a bit hard to follow.  I guess structurally this was a visual method by the director of subconciously offering to the theater screen viewers the plausible question ......... “What is she up to?” Actually that is the core plot to the film “What is she up to”.  Is she a Russian agent or a possible double agent or a triple agent or a quadruple agent? The film works overly hard to be unpredictable at every turn, but in the end it’s not that unpredictable at all. You figure her and them all out way too soon.

Now there were some light moments in the story including some amusing dialogue uttered by Russian superior’s constant characterization of Americans which are very much topical and currently saturated in our daily news coverage. I also got a chuckle about actor Matthias Schoenaerts who played the uncle who conveniently but definitely by no coincidence looked an awful lot like a younger Vladimir Putin, including his Cheshire cat smile. (PLOT HINT).

Ultimately I still found “Red Sparrow” a reasonable entertaining experience with Lawrence's showing a lot of courage, smarts, grace and humanity in her character. She comes across genuinely both strong and yet vulnerable as someone you find is decent and kind. But the film’s plot while briskly executed, sensational and lavish to look at, with some moments of intense intrigue, was still way too easy an espionage thriller to figure out. You can see the conclusion coming a mile away. 

For me a movie, any movie, even a spy movie, even a spy movie when it’s about a real life global adversary is still supposed keep you legitimately guessing and also having something or someone be the heroic symbol as part of its finale, even if their persona is both murderous and dark ( i.e. Michael Corleone). But in “Red Sparrow” none of its characters came across as a fundamental hero per se. Instead they were overly tightly honed fictional characters who were in a perpetual state of suspiciousness. Suspicious of people, places and things, whether they were friends or foes. Suspicious villainous people who all collectively were very good at lying to one another all the while never having or displaying any moral redeeming qualities to ever grasp to root for.

Krasnyy Vorobey, bezuslovno stoit posmotret', no, veroyatno tol'ko togda kogda on dostupen dlya arendy. Proshchay.

3.00 Stars