Red Sparrow, based on the 2013 novel ”Red Sparrow” by Jason Matthews
Genre: Spy Thriller
Director: Francis Lawrence
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Noel Edgerton, Joely Richardson, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy
Irons, Charlotte Rampling and Mary Louise Parker
“Ballerina Dominika Egorova is recruited to ‘Sparrow School,’ a Russian intelligence service where she is forced to use her body as a weapon. Her first mission, targeting a C.I.A. agent, threatens to unravel the security of both nations.”
Reuniting Hunger Games alums, director Francis Lawrence joins lead actress Jennifer
Lawrence; largely absent from the big-screen with the exception of Mother, where this is the first film in three years for director Lawrence since the Hunger Games.
This gritty return of the pair is in many ways a story not too dissimilar from the Hunger Games and could easily have been “the story we wanted to make the Hunger Games if other conclusions had been met”.
It tells the story of a ballerina who has been violently manoeuvered out of position, prestige, and power to now find herself in dire help of her beloved Russian state. However, no longer able to perform, a creepy uncle, Vanya Egorov played by Matthias Schoenaerts (Rust & Bone) blithely asks of her what else she has to offer in service of the State, and what she’s willing to sacrifice. He is of course, the Deputy Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
She’s soon put in to a compromising and violent situation that immediately makes a risk to the State. Recruited to “whore school” where Dominika is taught how to manipulate and seduce targets, guarded by her ever-watchful uncle Vanya, as penance she then finds herself embroiled in the hunt for a high-ranking mole in the Russian government. And so she goes on her way, looking fabulously svelte in black and a never-ending wardrobe of coats, jackets and trenches.
Forced in to a world of covert seduction, we’re always aware that this is not a place she wants to be nor never intended and we wonder how much loyalty you can buy from a hired hand. The story gives us a nation still reeling from the collapse of its Soviet power and scrambling to fill what it believes is a vacuum that the Western world is too lazy to fill. And so Russia must move through the world as its aegis and denizen.
If you’ve read the book, this film differs greatly in omitting a major feature of our protagonist, her synesthesia (where much of the red symbology draws from), that it alters the plot, so much so that you can say this story is not that story. It’s thrown out so casually as pillow talk that it may as well have not been added to the script. This is indeed, not a faithful adaptation, even in tone. The direction in this film was nothing special and there’s not much to say of it. The one call out I will make is, “THANK YOU FOR WIDE ANGLE ACTION SHOTS!”. Wonderfully absent are those close-in zooms, and snap cut scenes you very often find of action films that leave you a little confused as to whose limb is whose. The writing is mostly sloppy and there’s too many, “Well, that was convenient” moments to really sell itself as a spy thriller.
Jennifer Lawrence has lawded the experience of filming this, however she comes off very flat in this. Schooling a cool demeanour that’s hard to read, Dominika mostly comes off looking bored. Where Schoenaerts very rarely lets us down, he’s the only sporting anything resembling an accent, albeit not a Russian one. Where all other Russian characters are played by Americans or British actors, there is a serious lacking in decent accent play. Joely Richardson is wasted in the role of Dominika’s invalid mother, and Mary Louise Parker was a lush breath of fresh air.
The music and score in this is fairly run of the mill. I’m a big fan of James Newton Howard,
who composed The Dark Knight films, Split, and Blood Diamond. Here the music is delightfully unobtrusive, but also lacking character and I wonder if Howard was as bored with the film as I was. Predictably tense where it needs to be, it did often give the plot away. In contrast to Atomic Blonde, which this film has garnered a lot of comparison to prior to release, this is not the poppy romp that Atomic Blonde is.
While the “spy thriller” does not really ever get off the ground, it’s a plot that’s rather obvious and you are gratefully hanging on until the end trying to see where Dominika’s allegiance really does lie. This is the only thing that holds your attention until the end.
Ultimately, this film is trying to deep dive for psychological depths well beyond its reach and comprehension and manages to subvert its own mission statement.
Much like Hunger Games, we’re very much fed a story of a young woman with a growing awareness that her fate, life and body have never been her own, and fighting to gain that autonomy, whether through subversion or other means. Very aware of seeing this film through the male gaze in this film, the motivations behind the story are puzzling. Loosely based on a book written by an American ex-Central Intelligence Agency operative, it comes off with a reverent, “and this is why I really got into spy work, gi-giddy-giddy” reveal that comes off seedy and with dodgy, less than noble motivations. Indeed, the characters in this film are flat, blurry, and two-dimensional. The character arc of our heroine is such that it reminds me of Jessica Chastain’s recent critique of female roles, “When violence against women is used as a plot device to make the characters stronger then we have a problem. It is not empowering to be beaten and raped, yet so many films make it their ‘phoenix’ moment for women. We don’t need abuse in order to be powerful. We already are.”
Rated: R18 (contains violence, sexual violence, nudity, coarse language, depravity,
debasement, and some fairly creative and lingering torture scenes, but light on action)
Rating: 5/10
Must watch: Nice, easy watch while you’re cooking dinner
Worth a cinema watch: Nay
By Lena Davies
28th February 2018