Red Sparrow is a clumsy misfire

IT LOOKS brilliant with gorgeously composed shots and beautiful production design. But that’s about it.

THE greatest disappointment about Red Sparrow is that it could’ve been so much more than it was, so thank god it looked beautiful because it is badly written and confusing.

Jennifer Lawrence stars as Dominika Egorova, the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet whose illustrious career is cut short when her dance partner lands on and breaks her leg during a performance. Needing to care for her sick mother, she approaches her uncle Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts), a deputy in Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) for help.

He extorts her into becoming an agent, first sending her off for training at the bureaucratically named State School 4 to become a “Sparrow”, the SVR’s fleet of attractive men and women who use their sexual wiles to corrupt their targets.

She’s tasked with finding out the identity of a mole in the Russian government from CIA agent Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), but her alliances are never clear as she navigates through the dangerous field of betrayal, self-interest and survival at all costs.

The spy flick was billed as an exciting action thriller, if the trailers were anything to go by, but in reality it is actually a slow burn about Russian fatalism whose two hours and 20 minutes isn’t completely redeemed by the pay-off at the end.

And you do wonder if there is going to be a pay-off as you sit through Lawrence’s inscrutable performance, trying to puzzle out just who she was double-triple-quadruple-crossing at any given moment — it’s exhausting. Is that genius or befuddlement?

Style but no substance.

Lawrence gives a fairly wooden portrayal, but it feels like it wasn’t her choice. It feels like the hand of director Francis Lawrence, because we know she can give more.

The characterisation is woefully shallow, including Edgerton’s character who was ostensibly the male lead. At one point, someone says Nate is clearly an “emotional” guy though there is no evidence of it in the way the character is written.

It’s a quirk of the film that it likes to tell you what people are, rather than showing it, like the many times Dominika is praised for being a brilliant spy though she appears to be fairly ineffective most of the time.

It also means some brilliant actors — Jeremy Irons, Ciaran Hinds, Sakina Jaffrey, Charlotte Rampling and Bill Camp — are wasted in thankless supporting roles that don’t differentiate from one another, other than some are meant to be American spies and others are Russian spies with terrible Russian accents.

Non-atomic blonde.

The only person who gets to have any fun is Mary-Louise Parker who plays an inebriated political staffer — there definitely should’ve been more of her, if anything for a bit more levity. Belgian actor Schoenaerts as the nefarious uncle is also quite watchable, and he kind of even looks like Putin with that haircut.

Red Sparrow struggles to balance its story with its visual ambitions. It’s a gorgeously put-together movie with well-composed shots, especially of Lawrence walking through the streets of old Europe lined with fading buildings. Its production design and the restrained use of technology on screens also mean Red Sparrow has the feel of an old-school spy thriller despite its modern setting.

It doesn’t have the stylistic flair and energy of something like Atomic Blonde or anywhere the nuance of the Russian spy thriller TV series The Americans.

There’s no doubt Red Sparrow aspired to be more — it wanted to tell a story about female agents in a world where men try to control your body and your fate, and it wanted to say something about the Russian soul. But Justin Haythe’s script mostly misses the mark. At least it’s pretty.

Rating: 2.5/5

Red Sparrow is in cinemas from Thursday, March 1.

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