Red Sparrow – 2 out of 5
There’s only two things I heard about Red Sparrow when it came out: Number 1) It is boring and Number 2) Jennifer Lawrence gets nude in it. I’ll be honest; neither statement really made me interested to see the film. Nudity is great but it’s never a deciding factor on whether I’ll see a movie or not. It doesn’t help matters that most nudity in movies is superfluous and gratuitous anyway. However, while I will listen to the opinions of others, I never let them sway whether I’ll see a movie or not—because there isn’t a movie I won’t give a shot to. When I heard this one was boring (and incredibly so) I figured it was complete hyperbole…it wasn’t.
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| You'd be surprised how many times I've given a gross, sexist sex comedy a bad review and I've had some random dude tell me, "But you get to see boobs, it's not so bad." I'm glad my tastes in film and story isn't that simplistic. |
After popular ballerina Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) suffers a career-ending injury, she is given an unusual request by her uncle, the Deputy Director of SVR. In exchange for caring for her sick mother, Dominika is asked to seduce a Russian gangster. She accepts and finds herself falling into the life of a secret agent that specializes in seducing their targets and becomes entangled with an American agent named Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) who is on a mission of his own.
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| Thankfully, Marvel will be putting out a movie about a ballerina turned spy that will be infinitely better. |
There’s no point in delaying the inevitable and I’ll just come right out and say it; Red Sparrow is boring. The story moves at a snail’s pace and never really feels like it is working up to anything remotely interesting. The characters weren’t engaging enough to find interesting or invest in and the two leads have very little chemistry together. The film has some fantastic performances and the premise feels very sound but the final product is just brutal in how dull it is and how the whole thing feels like a chore to sit through. The movie is essentially a thriller but it feels like it is forgetting to include the thrills.
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| That blank look is the same face I had the entire film. |
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| There's so much talent in this shot but they couldn't save this boring story. |
The only real saving grace for the movie is the fact that the performances are really good. There’s supporting players like Jeremy Irons and Ciarán Hinds bringing gravitas to their roles and then you have two very talented players in the leads with Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton. Despite how boring and dragging this spy “thriller” is these two are genuinely great in their roles (although I wasn’t a fan of Lawrence’s accent—kinda felt like it came and went). Sadly, when these two are together, there is no chemistry to make their character’s relationship interesting. Separately, they are fantastic. Together, they are as lifeless as the film’s story and plot.
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| Joel Edgerton is a great actor but he's not a miracle worker. No one is in this film. The performances were not to blame for this one. |
Red Sparrow has a premise that feels primed and ready for some great spy thrills and intrigue—even if it doesn’t go the action route, you could still get a tense feature. Additionally, the acting is genuinely good. However, the film ended up providing a story that moved too slowly and didn’t provide enough intrigue to make it flow with its slow pace. The end result is a film that was hard to get invested in.
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