Red Sparrow (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2873282



Director Francis Lawrence, who previously directed Jennifer Lawrence (no relation between them two) in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hunger Games: Mockinjay Part 1 and 2, adapts the acclaimed spy novel Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews to the screen, starring Jennifer Lawrence in the title role.

The story is very simple:

Dominika Egorova, or "Red Sparrow", is a former Russian ballerina who is forced by her uncle to undergo espionage training for the Russian government at the Sparrow School, where people are trained to seduce their targets.

Her mission is to identify a high ranking official inside the SVR RF, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation formerly known as the KGB, who is also a double agent working as a CIA mole.

Jennifer Lawrence gives her usual wooden performance in the title role accented by her perpetual bug-eyed deer in the headlights facial expression.

The supporting cast composed of Joel Edgerton, Charlotte Rampling, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ciarán Hinds, Jeremy Irons, Mary-Louise Parker and many others come across even more wooden and disinterested than Lawrence.

The narrative of the story here tries to be more in the fashion of great spy thrillers film such as John le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Russia House than the more action oriented spy thrillers such as the James Bond or Jason Bourne films but even at that, it doesn't deliver.

Why?

Because the movie itself fails to create any tension, thrills, chills and sense of dread due to an inept shallow screenplay that have taken the content of its source novel and chopped it up into a 140 minutes over long slower than molasses film made up of different set pieces:

some of those just felt forced, unnecessary and unrelated to the whole, resulting in a final cut being devoid of any action which is okay if the rest of the whole was interesting and intelligent but it's not.

Furthermore this was also supposed to be a smart and sexy spy thriller but there is nothing smart nor sexy about it when it equates brutal violence to sexiness.

By the time the identity of the mole is revealed and the climactic scene is shown, a scene which I won't spoil but I will say it's the only thing in this long not very hot mess that gave it anything sense and identity vaguely resembling a spy thriller, you'd want to ask yourself why did you waste nearly 140 minutes of your life watching this drivel without any redeeming social value.

The final frame before the ending credits left this open for a sequel.

Will Red Sparrow become another film franchise for Jennifer Lawrence?

I sincerely hope not!!

Heck, if the command and operational procedures and techniques shown in this fim is really how the Russian intelligence agencies operate, I can clearly see why they lost the Cold War!



2/5