Red Sparrow

photo courtesy of comingsoon.net

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Academy-award winner Jennifer Lawrence and Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence reunite for Red Sparrow, a spy thriller about a Russian ex-ballerina who gets swept up into the world of international espionage and spycraft. When an assignment goes awry, Dominika is given a choice: become a sparrow—a member of an elite squad specializing in seduction—or die. As a sparrow, she’s tasked with manipulating an American agent (Joel Edgerton) into revealing the identity of a high-ranking mole within the Russian intelligence apparatus. And while Dominika proves more than equal to the task, she soon finds herself in a world of competing allegiances where no one but herself can ensure her survival.

     There are plenty of things that stick out about Red Sparrow, and very few of them are good things. Red Sparrow parades through a series of alternatively disturbing, punishing, and otherwise austere events anchored only by Jennifer Lawrence’s performance. A spy movie can make up for just about anything if its story is sufficiently interesting, but Red Sparrow fails on that count, too; it feels like a wannabe John le Carré spy novel, reproducing all the obligatory plot points without any of the smarts or thrills.

photo courtesy of dailydot.com

     Red Sparrow quickly sets up its world, and boy, is it a miserable one. The screen is populated with dreary grey and white: a cold, cruel, Russian society, where men talking quietly in mahogany office-libraries dispassionately determine what happen to masses of helpless people. It’s perhaps no wonder that the movie comes across as soulless when its characters (protagonist included) have all learned to suppress their livelihood in order to survive.

     Making matters worse is the fact that the movie, at two hours and twenty minutes in length, is too long by nearly half. Many excellent spy thrillers are bleak and overlong, but those spy thrillers can overcome a long runtime because they know how to let a story simmer as it develops. Red Sparrow, however, is overlong primarily because it includes far, far too much set-up; the first thirty minutes (at least) provide introduction and backstory don’t serve any essential narrative function. It’s dead weight, plain and simple—or perhaps, the proper first act to an entirely different movie.

photo courtesy of comingsoon.net

     Once the first section is out of the way, Red Sparrow’s next major chunk is devoted to Dominika’s training to become a “Red Sparrow.” As I’ve already mentioned, the sparrows accomplish their goals largely by way of seduction, and so the training sequences carry the bulk of the movie’s sexual content (much of which takes the form of sexual violence). I think that, in context, there are valid arguments to justify depicting sexual violence onscreen, but Red Sparrow’s violence feels far too explicit, exceptionally in-your-face, and entirely unnecessary.

     Rather than present a mature, discerning depiction of sexual violence designed to advance the story or add emotional insight, these scenes feel more like a shameless attempt to add shock value. It’s as if someone was asking, “What’s the creepiest sexual scenario we can imagine, and can we feasibly make it something a commanding officer would require of an agent in a training scenario?” And for every predatory Russian deviant who ogles Dominika, there’s another shot where the camera very indelicately invites the audience to ogle her. These choices undercut the movie’s ability to convey anything meaningful about sexual violence—an oversight that speaks volumes about its overall creative capacity. In any case, let me state without equivocation: Red Sparrow is rated R with a capital R.  

photo courtesy of npr.com

     Red Sparrow eventually picks up some steam when it pushes beyond the training sequences into the main body of the film. This section, where Dominika actually sets out on her mission, finally brings the audience a measure of intrigue; we’re introduced to villains, shadowy characters, allies who can’t be trusted, etc, and Dominika begins to navigate the murky world of international politics. You know, spy things.

     Even here, however, the movie isn’t particularly strong, becoming entangled in frustrating mistakes. Its dialogue is often weak and overexplanatory, as when, in one scene, Dominika takes a break from seducing her target to provide him a full paragraph on her character development. The editorial pacing in several early scenes disrupts the movie’s flow, lingering too long or moving on too quick.

photo courtesy of collider.com

     And Red Sparrow’s script also displays some annoying characterization tendencies, having its otherwise tactically-minded characters make silly, illogical choices or disguising wild speculations as strokes of genius. (That last nitpick happens all the time, even in the best of detective stories; BBC’s Sherlock, for instance, frequently has Holmes impress the other characters with “deductions” that are actually improbable conjectures, but we accept them in the context of the show. Red Sparrow provides no such context—it merely assumes that the audience accepts Dominika’s logical leaps as evidence of her uncanny perceptive abilities).

     If there’s something worth seeing the movie for, it’s probably Jennifer Lawrence’s performance; she transforms into several different personas over the course of the movie, and each of them are well-acted. Dominika is sort of a re-vamped Katniss Everdeen, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Lawrence knows how to make the character compelling. Her performance earns Red Sparrow’s big, climactic twist, which enjoyably re-contextualizes some key events and puts the finishing touch on her character arc.

photo courtesy of screenrant.com

     But Lawrence can’t solve what is perhaps the movie’s biggest problem: that it feels utterly out of touch with reality, irrelevant, tone deaf. Watching the trailers for the movie, I assumed a Cold War setting, but Red Sparrow actually takes place in what is supposedly modern day. The movie acknowledges its retro vibe, going so far as to have one character admit that their spy programs are a continuation of Cold War (in other words, that the War never ended). And while the character is perhaps right, in a sense, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the modern struggle for international power doesn’t look like this at all. It looks like internet trolls, collusion hearings, and twitter diplomacy, not sexy spies or elite schools of black ops assassins. Without any kind of appeal to a realistic political landscape, therefore, Red Sparrow is nearly a total creative misfire.

Watch the trailer here. 

photo courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com