Red Sparrow - Largely satisfactory

When Red Sparrow was doing its rounds in the reviews last year, the opinion was largely universal.  All were agreed it was good that Jennifer Lawrence was getting her acting chops into something a little more edgy (though we shouldn't forget she was in Winter's Bone before she became a wannabee for a generation of teenage girls in the Hunger Games saga - hardly a Disney movie), but no one was quite sure if the film itself was actually any good.  Time to find out for myself. 

Edgy is right.  Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova, Russian ballerina who's leg is broken in an 'accident', takes bloody revenge on her partner and is then recruited into the Russian secret service after the state tells her that the care her ill elderly mother relies on will be taken away if she refuses.  So she goes along, initially being raped by a man who is then strangled to death in front of her, then being further coerced into training as a 'Sparrow' - an expert in seduction, working out what it is that people want and using that to be the best spy there is.  Cue multiple scenes of Lawrence being beaten up, beating people up, sexualised violence, torture, the lot.  How will she escape this world?  Will she escape this world?  Edgy indeed.

I'm always happy to see an actor who could easily settle down into the Hollywood mainstream take on different roles.  Viggo Mortensen is the go-to case-in-point here.  Lawrence has a long way to go before she matches his shunning of the mainstream, and Red Sparrow is hardly an indie movie, but its difficult material mean its a film the audience who made her famous are unlikely to seek out.

As usual with a film like this, plenty of people are given ample opportunity to engage in - I presume - awful Russian accents.  Alongside Lawrence herself, Charlotte Rampling, Ciaran Hinds and Matthias Schoenaerts all get to ham it up as various arms of the Russian secret services, pledging allegiance to the state and the president, doing it for the motherland etc.  Do they even try to market these finds in CIS countries?  Probably not.

Perhaps the most surprisingly thing about Red Sparrow is that there's a lot of politics to dissect if you're willing to sit and think about it for a bit.  It's about the way that women are still treated, and are expected to allow themselves to be treated in the modern era.   Even in a post-me-too world, Dominika and her sexuality are commodities that are expected to be of use to the state (i.e. older men).  The plot flirts nicely with the idea of her being 'rescued' by the handsome American spy, with the central turn being about what she can do to beat a system she has being coerces into - go to the Americans, the nice American spy, the Russians, or something else entirely?  Perhaps it's something hinting at #MetToo, something that suggests she is far from turning into the next generation of the brainwashed automaton of the state played by Charlotte Rampling - a new generation with new ideas.  I found the result largely satisfactory, even though the film descends into spy cliche for portions at the start of its final act.

"Largely satisfactory".  Yep - that.