'Red Sparrow' Is a Problematic but Generally Worthwhile Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller

Red Sparrow is a spy thriller film starring Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Russian ballerina-turned-spy Dominika Egorova.  When her dancing career comes to a heartbreaking end due to an injury, she is forced to go to go to Sparrow School in order to maintain the financial support for her mother’s medical needs.  There, she’s trained to become a “Sparrow”, an operative that is willing and proficient in utilizing seduction and sex for the sake of a mission.  She proves to excel in the craft, and her superiors soon give her the important assignment of gaining the trust of CIA officer Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) and find out the identity of the well-placed mole that he’s handling.

When Red Sparrow made its first buzz, a large number of people commented it seemed to be J-Law doing a Black Widow movie.  However, it’s not really liked that.  It felt more like a vehicle for J-Law to get naked (yep, this movie has J-Law nude scenes).  It’s as if this was her way of “taking control of the situation” after she was hacked and her nude photos (and videos, too? Not sure) spread online a few years ago.  It’s as if she was like, “Since nude photos of me are already forever available out there anyway, might as well let everyone see me naked at my own terms.”

Kidding aside, I don’t think this movie is anywhere near being Black Widow-esque because of one important detail: it doesn’t have any Black Widow-esque action at all.  To be honest, it’s a bit of a bummer because I was hoping that J-Law would go Atomic Blonde with this one.  At the very least, I hope she performs some cool assassinations (she doesn’t).

The heavy presence of sexual content is expected for what it was going for, but there’s a sense of randomness to it that it comes off as more of being gratuitous than artistic and thoughtful.  Also, the pacing suffers from the needlessly long run time.  But despite my problems with this film, I really thought the climactic final 20 or so minutes offer sufficient payoff to make up for them.  It was like everything satisfyingly clicked into place and the movie, with all its choppiness, immediately became worth it overall.

Lastly, I was surprised that this film is set in the post-Soviet Union period.  I had read long ago of Sparrows, and I don’t know why, but I’ve assumed since then that they were a KGB-exclusive project and were only operational during the Cold War.  Hence, when I learned that this movie is about Sparrows, I thought it was going to be a Cold War-era espionage movie.  This movie implying that Sparrows are still doing jobs in modern times gave me a slight shock.

Still, considering its “old-school, hard-boiled” atmosphere, I believe Red Sparrow would have been more appealing if it had been indeed set during the Cold War.  But that’s just me.