Sunday, March 4, 2018

Red Sparrow

I am a huge fan of espionage so I was really intrigued by Red Sparrow and went to see it yesterday.  Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is a ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow when she suffers a career ending injury at the hands of a fellow dancer.  Worried that she will no longer be able to support her ailing mother (Joely Richardson) she is coerced by her uncle (Matthias Schoenaerts), an agent in Russian intelligence, to become a Sparrow, an agent trained to seduce her target to gain information.  After grueling training under the tutelage of the Matron (Charlotte Rampling) at State School 4, or “Sparrow School,” she is sent to Budapest to meet up with Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), a CIA agent, to learn the identity of the double agent he is running in Moscow.  I judge all spy movies on whether or not they can keep me guessing and this is an intense and suspenseful thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat trying to unravel who was double-crossing whom.  There is not a lot of action, like you would normally see in a typical spy thriller, but the character-driven intrigue is what creates the tension.  I think Jennifer Lawrence gives a good performance and I wasn't at all bothered by her much-maligned accent.  There are some pretty graphic sex and torture scenes but, in my opinion, they are appropriate within the context of the story and not at all gratuitous.  One particularly disturbing scene where an attempted rape is recreated at the Sparrow school is used to help Dominika learn to detach herself from her body.  It is exploitative but that is the entire point of the movie.  She has been forced into this situation by men with power over her and that is what makes the final resolution so incredibly satisfying!  These scenes might bother some some sensitive viewers but I actually thought they were a lot tamer than what I was led led to believe.  I liked this movie quite a bit and I would recommend it to fans of the genre.

Note: I thought the nudity and sex in Atomic Blonde was much more gratuitous.

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