It’s been too long since the last Matt’s Movie Monday and I wanted to write about Annihilation so we would have a worthy movie to come back to. But since it’s already been out a full week, I decided to go with one that just came out, Red Sparrow.
(Mini Matt’s Movie Monday: Annihilation. Kind of trippy sci-fi flick. I liked it a lot, but it may not be for everybody. Watch the trailer, read the plot description at IMDB. If it sounds interesting, go see it. It’s been a couple of days since I’ve seen it and I’m still not sure I fully understand what happened. Which I like, but again, that may not be for everyone. 86/100)
Any movie that stars Jennifer Lawrence is off to a good start. She turns in another fantastic performance in Red Sparrow, unfortunately she’s about the only consistently good thing about the movie. Lawrence stars as Dominika Egorova, a Russian ballet dancer for the Bolshoi company who suffers a career ending injury during a performance. The hits keep coming as the Bolshoi stop paying for her mother’s medical treatments. As she wonders what her life will become, her uncle Ivan offers her a proposition. He is high up in the Intelligence department of the Russian government. He tells Dominika all she has to do is meet and seduce Dimitry Ustinov, a Russian politician. The night goes according to plan until Ustinov attempts to rape Dominika. At that point Ustinov is killed by Russian operative Simyonov. This is revealed to be a set up, as the intention all along was to kill Ustinov. As there can be no witnesses to the murder, Ivan gives Dominika a choice: work for the Russian government or be killed. She is sent to train to become a ‘Sparrow,’ used to seduce assigned targets.
On the American side, the story follows CIA agent Nate Nash (played by Joel Edgerton), originally stationed in Moscow. While meeting with an asset, they are approached by police. To protect his contact, Nash fires his gun as a diversion. His contact gets away but his cover his blown, so he is taken out of Moscow by his superiors. He is reassigned to Budapest in attempt to regain contact with his asset, code named Marble.
There are definitely some good moments here, but they are too few and far between. Part of that is the movie is just too long. It’s 2 hours and 20 minutes and you feel every minute. As you’re watching the movie, you can point out specific scenes that you know in the moment could have/should have been cut. Fair warning to anyone who sees it this at some point: Lots of the Sparrow School parts could have been cut out with nothing lost. Simply cutting the run time would have been a big boost to the overall quality of the movie. But to be clear, there are a host of other problems with Red Sparrow. Lawrence’s performance almost seems wasted, as she was head and shoulders better than everyone else in the movie. Not that they were bad, per se, but she was just so good. The imbalance was always present on screen. Obviously she was speaking with a Russian accent throughout the movie and I can’t really speak to how well that was done. But setting that aside, it was just a good, solid performance. There was really no chemistry between Lawrence and Edgerton. Given that their relationship is central to the movie’s plot, that’s a problem. And the movie makes no effort to get you to care about any character besides Lawrence’s Dominika.
There are a bunch of questions as to where Dominika’s true loyalties and motivations lie which makes for some fun, if predictable twists and turn. I thought the final twist was predictable, but I still enjoyed it as I was unable to figure out the “how” of it all before the big reveal.
One other bright spot was Mary-Louise Parker. She played Stephanie Boucher, a boozy, Chief of Staff for a U.S. senator trying to set up a deal to sell US secrets to the Russians. She was only on screen for a few minutes, but she was very fun in a performance reminiscent of her time as Nancy Botwin. Which also leads to perhaps the most preposterous part of the whole movie (don’t worry, this is only a very minor spoiler). The information Boucher is attempting to sell is contained on…wait for it…floppy disks! I kid you not, honest to goodness floppy disks. How many teenagers even know what a floppy disk is? Unless I missed it, they never give an exact year the movie takes place, but based on context, it clearly is set yeeeeaaaarrrrsss after floppy disks were relevant. This was something I just couldn’t wrap my head around.
Movie: Red Sparrow Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Genre: Mystery, thriller Rated: R for Strong violence (not a consistently violent movie, but when they go for it, oh boy do they go for it), torture, sexual content, language, nudity My rating: 6.8/10 Should you see it? Depends what you’re looking for. If you’re hoping to find the next great spy thriller, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for decent matinée, then Lawrence’s performance probably makes it worth it. But I would wait and see if it comes to Netflix or another streaming service. If it does, then absolutely fire it up.
