Film Review - Red Sparrow (2018)

Red Sparrow is based off of the novel and is directed by Francis Lawrence who made the Hunger Games sequels in 2013, 14 and 15 respectively and he re teams with Jennifer Lawrence once again who this time plays a Russian ballet dancer who’s leg is injured on stage and is then offered to join the Sparrow program which moulds young recruits into agents of the state and with an American agent (Joel Edgerton) getting wind of a mole in the Russian government the race is on to find him and expose the mole.

I enjoyed Red Sparrow most while I was watching it but when it was over and I walked out of the cinema I began to think of it less and less to the point where I began to think of it as forgettable not bad in any sense of the word but just a in one ear out the other kind of movie.

However first off I want to talk about Francis Lawrence as the director he does a good job here with very dark and complicated material and with this and his Hunger Games work I’ve begun to think of him as someone who is making the kind of material that Paul Verhoeven used to make when he was at his peak in the US in the late 80s and early to mid 90s.

Movies like Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers these are films that not only were mainstream action/science fiction/thrillers that people could go and see but they also had something more to them be it satire or a frankness about violence or the sense of something being either reality or a dream and dealing with sex and sexual matters in a very straightforward way that didn’t try to hide it and there are scenes in Red Sparrow that reminded me a lot of Verhoven’s work and this could have been a film he might have made back 25-30 years ago.

And also Jennifer Lawrence (the two aren’t related) does a good job here despite having to nail the Russian accent and deliver a compelling performance and she does well with both Edgerton meanwhile has a tricky role to deliver and he does okay while there are a slew of side performances like Matthias Schoenarts, Charlotte Rampling, Ciaran Hinds (easily as forgettable as he was in Justice League) and Jeremy Irons who is falling into a little bit of a Michael Caine territory recently taking acting jobs to earn some cash.

However this movie has 2 big problems:

- Firstly this movie is just too long its runtime is 140 minutes but it felt like a long 2 and a half hours and again when you go back to thrillers like Basic Instinct or even last year’s Atomic Blonde which this movie tries to emulate at times both of those were only a little bit over the 2 hour mark and this really could have used some tightening to keep its spy story at a good pace so it doesn’t start to waver off course and have the audience go “Hold on hold on, what’s going on here, I’m lost.”

- Secondly this story does get a little too twisty turny for its own good and going back to the length problem the story goes on for so long that you do find yourself getting a little lost about who’s working for who and who wants what and what does this person have to do with this or that and I wish it had been streamlined a little bit much like a heist film where at the end when all the pieces come together you go “Oh that makes sense well done” whereas here the twists and turns got a bit much after a while.

And lastly some of the hotel room scenes in this movie made me a little uncomfortable to sit through now I know these films are planned for years in advance but with everything that’s been revealed in regards to certain people in the industry and their methods it made me think “Why is this in this movie its not very nice to watch” and look I love dark movies I really really do especially the MA15+/R18+ kind I genuinely look forward to those but given everything that’s been revealed in recent months I would like to see those kind of scenes be rethought a little bit.

And so that was my review of Red Sparrow a well made but forgettable spy film, 2 out of 5.