Red Sparrow is based on a book series, although I don't know how
true to those books the film is. It's about Dominika (Lawrence), a famous
Russian ballerina whose career is ruined after a gruesome injury. Through
desperation and the meddling of her uncle (Matthias Schoenaerts), a high
ranking Russian intelligence officer, she is a recruited as a Sparrow: an elite
squad of Russian spies who are trained to use sex as a weapon or a tactic. The
movie follows her recruitment, training, and eventually, first mission. That
first mission is to target a CIA officer (Joel Edgerton) who has information
about a mole in the Russian government. From there, the movie goes on spy movie
auto-pilot.
By far, the most intriguing thing about Red Sparrow
is the idea of having these sex spies. Sex in the spy genre has always been
incidental. James Bond sleeping with a crime lord's wife, or whatever. I can't
think of a Hollywood movie that's actually looked at it unpologetically as part
of a mission. That's what makes a show like The Americans so
interesting. Sex is just part of the job. It's not a big deal. Red Sparrow
talks a big talk. The scenes at the facility where Dominika is trained to be a
Sparrow act like they are shocking. Charlotte Rampling (the matron of the
establishment) says a couple explicit things. The scenes themselves are pretty
tame though. What really bothered me is that Jennifer Lawrences comes out of
the movie without getting her hands dirty. Despite the pitch of the movie, she
doesn't really become a Sparrow. The movie is actually about how she rebels
against being a Sparrow and sidesteps everything in the training. Even the way
the camera blocking works for several scenes is conservative ("We can show
this but we can't show that"). It all feels like a
half-measure.
So let's say I can ignore the fact that Red
Sparrow moves away from the Sparrow angle as quickly as possible and
instead I look at it as the traditional spy movie that it really is. I can't
say I'm very impressed with that either. I think of it as the difference
between distance and displacement. Distance is the length of the journey.
Displacement is how far you've gone from where you started. Red Sparrow covers
a lot of distance for very little displacement. I didn't care for the twists
and turns of the story because they didn't change my understanding of the
characters at all. Whenever it looked like things were taking a big left turn,
only a few moments later, it would correct itself with a big right turn.
Fundamentally, the characters are the same at the beginning as they are at the
end. I suppose the big surprise of the movie is finding out who the mole really
is. Once that's revealed in the movie, I realized that I didn't actually care.
He was part of a story in a much different movie.
Jennifer Lawrence is fine in the movie. She's about
at that movie star level where she doesn't really disappear into roles. She
just plays herself as a different character. That isn't even a bad thing. It's
more of an undeniable consequence of fame. She's stuck playing a character who
is more of a collection of ideas than a person. For instance, the fact that
she's a famous ballerina doesn't mean much to the story. How does someone that
recognizable even get recruited as a secret agent? Even her moderate fame makes
the idea of her taking on an alias ridiculous. And what about her character in
the movie really makes you think she could've been a successful dancer? She has
almost no discipline and constantly ignores instruction. She's only a dancer
because "Russian ballerina sex spy" sounds better than "Russian
sex spy". I do believe Lawrence in the moment though. She sells individual
scenes. I just don't buy the whole character. The rest of the cast I like but
are pretty anonymous. I could come up with a list of a dozen actors who could
play Joel Edgerton's role the same way. I feel like Matthias Schoenaerts is
only in the movie because Mads Mikkelsen was busy. Charlotte Rampling adds a
legitimacy to the Sparrow training portion of the film that nearly tricks you
into thinking those parts add anything to the film. Mary Louise-Parker shows up
briefly, and I don't think anyone told her what kind of movie this was before
she broke out her best Nancy Botwin.
I'll admit, I'm being harsher on this movie than it
deserves. It's a perfectly harmless spy movie. It has all the beats it needs
for that kind of movie. It casts good actors who play the traditional roles as
well as they need to. I'm irritated because it pulled back from all the things
that were supposed to make it stand out. It's weird to have a movie about a spy
trained to use sex as a weapon but not have that spy use sex as a weapon all
that much. That would be like having a movie about an elite bike cop who spends
the whole movie on foot. Red Sparrow doesn't play to any of its
strengths.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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