Red Sparrow Review

I had hoped that Red Sparrow would engage a very interesting cultural shift, but was crushingly disappointed by such an uninteresting film. While Russians have never been in the good graces of American pop culture it’s been some time since I’ve seen a paranoid Russia-phobic spy thriller make its way into theaters. The fact that producers think this will actually succeed is reflective of our paranoia over Russian interference in American politics, perhaps signaling the start of a new Cold War or a continuation of one that never truly ended. And yet instead of feeling like an impactful film for the modern era along the same lines as Selma or The Florida Project it feels as though it’s a few decades behind the rest of the world.

Dominika (Jennifer Lawrence) is a Russian ex-ballet dancer who is recruited into a secret training program to become an assassin. After her training, she’s tasked with gaining the trust of an American CIA agent (Joel Edgerton) while struggling to navigate the backstabbing world of the Russian government.

If you’ve been paying attention to the marketing of this film you might expect it to be a sexy action-thriller, with high stakes and engaging intrigue. Well, you have been deceived and your consolation prize is wasted potential.

There are so many aspects about Red Sparrow that annoy me that I’m not sure where to start. I could complain for hours about the dull cinematography, bare minimum set design and the actors’ horrible Russian accents, but let’s get to the core of the problem: it’s mind numbingly boring. I have nothing against the idea of a Russian espionage film in principle, but if you are going to go with that premise you need to come up with a new spin on it to make it interesting. Hunt for Red October had an interesting premise with the silent submarine, Man from U.N.C.L.E. had Guy Ritchie’s signature style and humor and Atomic Blonde had a vibrant neon color scheme set against the backdrop of East Germany’s underbelly. Red Sparrow has no identity other than being a Russian spy movie. It’s as if you took any one of the several bland, paperback spy novels your dad is always reading and just transferred it directly to screen, which, as it turns out, is exactly what they did.

The pacing doesn’t help make it more exciting; I’m sure this slow, methodical approach worked a lot better in the book, leaving time for the main character to be fully fleshed out through internal monologue, but in the film it just feels like the movie is dragging its feet. We’re stuck in the Russian training camp for the first forty minutes where nothing is happening in regards to the main plot. Couldn’t we have just started with her graduating from assassin school and left her past as a mysterious backstory? Apparently not.

For a movie with such potential for political storytelling there’s no point to take away. Perhaps the point was to just observe how evil the Russian government is, but it feels halfhearted. Firstly, the CIA people are presented to be just as scummy as the KGB. Secondly, we are never given a reason to care. Russian agents constantly do jarringly horrible things to our protagonists and I wasn’t the slightest bit affected by it because the characters aren’t worth investing in. Nobody is given any sort of charm or interesting qualities and despite a backstory so dark it could rival The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I never found Dominika interesting.

I’m going to call it now: this is going to be on many “Worst Films of 2018” lists come next December. It’s certainly the blandest film of the new year; lack of personality, lack of significant filmmaking talent and lack of any reason to care all combine to make the film equivalent of a rice cake dipped in a thin layer of sewage.