Summary
After a career ending accident, former ballerina Dominika Egorova is recruited into “sparrow school,” a specialized spy branch in Russia, where the agents are taught to use their powers of seduction as a tool.
Vladimir Putin (left) and Matthias Schoenaerts (right) look incredibly similar. Coincidence? I think not!
My Thoughts
I can usually tell how good a movie is based on how far into the film I start checking my phone, asking myself the question: how much longer until this is over? During Red Sparrow, Jennifer Lawrence’s Russian espionage thriller, I first checked my phone at about forty-five minutes, and then at about an hour and a half, then and hour and fifty-five minutes, and then a few more times before the movie finally ended. When the credits rolled, I gave a sigh of relief, stood up, left the theater, and didn’t think any more about this film until now, when I sat down to write a review for it. This is a corpse of a film; it’s stiff, it doesn’t have anything interesting to say, and it’s way too bloated.
Why did I dislike this film so much? Well, I suppose it’s best to start at the beginning.
After a tragic accident, Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”), a former famed Russian ballerina, is forced to find a new line of work in order to pay for her sick mother’s treatment, and, with nowhere else to go, she turns to her Vladimir-Putin-lookalike Uncle (Matthias Schoenaerts, “The Drop”), a government agent, whom sends her to ‘Sparrow School,’ a training program where participants are taught to use their bodies as weapons. After undergoing rigorous training, Dominika is given an assignment: Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton, '“Bright”), a known CIA operative working on Russian soil. Dominika tries to seduce Nash, but Nash is savvy to her game; still, he plays along, his endgame being to recruit her to help with the CIA. Dominika seemingly falls in love with Nash, but we don’t know if that love is genuine, or if it’s just Dominika using her state-taught seduction skills.
My biggest issue with this film is that it feels like anti-Russian propaganda. First off, it’s ridiculous to think that an uncle would send his niece to a school where it is pretty much implied she’s going to have to sleep with and possibly kill people. They even address this problem, but Dominika says that her uncle is a patriot, and that is brief explanation is supposed to explain away our disbelief. Almost every single Russian man that Dominika runs into is a pig; they all want to sleep with her, they’re sleazy, and they drool over her almost cartoonishly. The Americans she runs into, however, are respectful, and they treat her with dignity. Russian spies are portrayed over and over again as oafish, violent criminals that revel in the shady underworld of spycraft, while the Americans spies are idolized as brave good-hearted people. I’m not saying that Russians aren’t responsible for some bad things (I certainly wouldn’t want to be a journalist under Putin’s rein), but after a while, seeing only villainous men becomes a little ridiculous. Are we expected to believe that lying dormant inside every Russian male is the personality of a rapist or a killer? That’s ludicrous.
Another issue I had was that this picture had so many needless subplots. This film, as I mentioned before, is quite long, but worse, it feels even longer than it’s length. This is in part because of plots that come into the film, take up fifteen minutes of time, and then are never mentioned again. To make matters worse, some of these bunny-trails make absolutely no sense at all. Perhaps one of the weirder divergent paths comes along right at the beginning of the film, after Dominika has already had her accident (a male ballerina accidentally landed on her leg and snapped it during a performance). Dominika’s uncle comes to her with an envelope, and inside Dominika finds a voice recording of the ballerina that broke her leg; she finds out that he purposely broke her leg so that he could dance with a different ballerina. After gleaning this information, Dominika goes back to the ballet school and assaults both the ballerina responsible and the ballerina’s lover with a cane, breaking the woman’s jaw, and leaving both of them bleeding in a shower. She then feels bad and makes an anonymous phone call to the police, and this plot never is mentioned again. This little side story takes up a good amount of time, and if you think about it for even a moment, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Why on earth would Russian spies waste time trailing Ballerinas? Are they concerned that these people have sensitive information that might jeopardize national security? Also, what is the point in Dominika seemingly loosing control of her temper and almost killing two almost-innocent people, especially when, for the remainder of the film, she remains level headed and cool even in the face of torture?
Acting is another issue here. Everyone that had a Russian accent struggled with it. Lawrence was better than most, but when she needed to emote her voice slipped back into its American cadence. I was not impressed with Lawrence’s portrayal of Dominika, either; there’s a difference between playing a character as cold and merciless, and being utterly expressionless. Even when Lawrence was supposed to be under great stress, she wore the same vacant, almost bored, look. Jeremy Irons (“Dead Ringers”) , though he wasn’t in the film for a remarkable amount of time, was probably the best with the Russian accent, while Charlotte Rampling (“45 Years”), sadly, was probably the worst. Joel Edgerton gave one of his more middling performances; utterly unremarkable. The chemistry between Lawrence and Edgerton is tenuous at best. I wouldn't believe they were estranged exes, let alone passionate lovers. The dialogue is definitely part of the issue; many characters are given long, expositional monologues that lay out their motivations for doing things. It feels unnatural and, in some scenes, is cringe worthy.
There are dozens of other nitpicky things that don’t make sense under any sort of inspection as well. Things that, from a distance, might seem trivial, but when added up they really take away from the film. For instance, Dominika meets up with Mary Louise Parker (“R.E.D.”) to get some information, and she brings with her a stack of floppy disks… what? Floppy disks? Did spycraft tech suddenly revert 40 years? Towards the end of the film (I’ll try to be vague so as not to spoil anything), Dominika doesn’t disclose some information to her American counterparts, and they are surprised during an exchange of prisoners. Had this surprise happened in real life, the entire exchange would’ve fallen apart, but instead it goes off without a hitch, despite one of the Americans loudly and stupidly proclaiming “Who is that?”
Verdict
This film was boring and utterly forgettable. I have no problem with long, slower paced films; in fact, most of the time I prefer them. But there is a difference between being artfully and tastefully long, and having a swollen runtime. This film could have been okay (not good), if they’d left a third of the movie on the cutting room floor, but as it stands now, this film is a droning monotone bore that borders on propaganda. There are a few good scenes, but two or three good scenes do not make a movie worth watching.
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