300 Words on "Red Sparrow" (2018)

The world of the spy thriller is an inherently intriguing one. The mercurial landscape of shifting alliances, double-crosses, and shielded secrets makes for engaging and exciting viewing in just about any espionage adventure. What happens, however, when a movie has too many secrets, double-crosses, and shifting alliances? It’s very likely to turn out like Red Sparrow.

While the plot of Red Sparrow is pretty straightforward compared to some of the more complex plots weaved in spy thrillers, the movie feels needlessly bogged down by its hefty script which makes its two-hour-twenty-minute run-time feel even longer than it is. It is a film which requires much of its audience; prerequisites for any viewer including having an ironclad stomach. Even I must admit to having found the copious amounts of gratuitous sex and violence in the film to be extreme, and director Francis Lawrence does nothing to stylize the bloodletting on screen to feel like anything other than a moment of shock for the masses.

Where the film was stylized, however, was in its breathtaking cinematography, editing, and musical score – all of which complemented each other so well and gave Red Sparrow an at once lush and gritty aesthetic of the sort which put me in mind of David Fincher at his best. But, as noted above, director Lawrence is no master like Fincher and, though he coaxed a good performance from lead Jennifer Lawrence (whose Russian accent is actually quite excellent), there were no few occasions when I felt that a truly skilled hand was behind the camera.

Red Sparrow was an engaging watch – its genre almost guaranteed that – but I was left feeling rather hollow, and unsatisfied. Though it is clear that Red Sparrow wanted to bring the beloved Cold War thriller firmly into the modern day, this attempt at doing so fell just short.