There’s an early chunk of the film that’s set at Sparrow School, a secret Soviet spy factory dedicated to turning out women who can seduce anyone and who are able to manipulate targets. Her first assignment is a brutal mess, and she witnesses something she shouldn’t, which only pushes her even further into this dangerous new life. Her uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts) offers her a new life, and after testing her temperament and finding she has a capacity for merciless violence, he presses her into service for his branch of the government. When her leg is broken in a savage accident, Dominika’s prospects suddenly look fairly bleak, and she finds herself unsure about how she’s going to make a living. It helps in terms of storytelling because it gives them a very simply defined moral landscape on which to play out a story about power and the ways it can be used as a weapon.ĭominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi, enjoying all of the privilege that position offers, including constant medical care for her mother (Joely Richardson). It is apparently set right now, and while it’s easy to view Russia as “the bad guys” again right now, the film feels like it’s set in a world where we have modern technology but the politics of the mid-‘80s, feeling more like a world based loosely on real Russians. If you’d asked me during the film’s first half-hour, I would have told you it’s a period piece set during the Cold War. One of the strangest things about the film is the setting. It is perhaps too ornately plotted for its own good at times, but I respect the unsparing way the film approaches some of its more unsavory elements. It is a deliberate, slow-burning spy film about a young woman who finds herself drawn into a world against her will, forcing her to learn how to either master the spy game, or end up dead. That is not true of the film as a whole, and one of the things that should be stressed to audiences is that Red Sparrow is not an action film. Many people have commented that the trailers for the film made it look like Fox just made a Black Widow movie without owning Black Widow. While not exactly the product that the film’s marketing promised, it is stuffed with good ideas and strong performances, and in many ways, it’s the most complete thing yet from director Francis Lawrence. By that measure, RED SPARROW is a perfectly-tailored Jennifer Lawrence movie. Jennifer Lawrence has made a career out of playing young women who find themselves forced to play someone else’s game, and what defines those characters has been the way they push back against whatever system it is that seems determined to screw them.
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