#REVIEWS OF RED SPARROW MOVIE#
#REVIEWS OF RED SPARROW SKIN#
#REVIEWS OF RED SPARROW SOFTWARE#

The actress is re-teamed here with Hunger Games director (who is no relation), and I’m not sure he’s the best person for the task, seeming to rely heavily on trotting out tropes of the genre we’ve seen too often before.

#REVIEWS OF RED SPARROW MOVIE#

This doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie especially if you can get past Lawrence’s accent, her performance is worth a look, and as an ice-cold tale of deep-frozen international intrigue, the 140 minutes go past quicker than I initially thought they might. Not sure I’d go that far: I know it’s a great deal less fun, and also which of the two is the only film I’ll have in my collection. But it is considerably more serious in intent, though the case could be made (and has been), that it’s ultimately less empowering and more exploitative.

#REVIEWS OF RED SPARROW SKIN#

The heroine is certainly not as active a participant, though it’s creepy as hell to see Dominika energetically wielding a tool usually reserved for carrying out skin grafts. It’s no less brutal than Blonde, deserving its adult rating for violence and torture as much as the sexual content. Sparrow could easily take place in any Eastern bloc city, at any time since the end of World War II. It isn’t, and you should not expect anything with such gleeful abandon, or such a defiant sense of era and location. The trailers may have somewhat betrayed it, making it look like a modern version of Atomic Blonde (or even an origin story for Black Widow!). If you think it’s supposed to be “sexy”, you’re the problem, not the film. But, partly in response to her taunting, he’s unable to perform. Nothing illustrates that better than Lawrence’s nude scene, during a very public training session as what she herself calls “whore school” A classmate who had previously tried to rape Dominika is ordered to have sex with her. Here, the sexual encounters are weaponized, and are as much about power as anything. Both are often about sex yet that doesn’t make them “sexy”, especially when the director depicts the ugly aspects as much as (if not more often than) the erotic. is how the film has been misunderstood, reading reviews which say things like, “ Red Sparrow is intended to be a sexy thriller.” No, it’s not, any more than Showgirls was. Or is that actually part of Dominika’s game-plan, to appear as a potential defector? It’s only right at the end, by the time many wheels have turned, that we discover whose side she’s really on: not much of a spoiler to reveal that it’s her own. For it’s clear from the start that he is not taken in by her facade and sees the honey-pot for what it is – yet thinks she can still be a useful asset, who can be recruited and turned. This is dour stuff by comparison, almost unremittingly grim in the dehumanizing way the Russians use Dominika, Dominika uses Nate, and Nate uses Dominika.

The most obvious recent touchstone is Atomic Blonde, which I found considerably more entertaining – even if it is, I would venture, considerably less realistic. He had to leave Moscow after an incident involving him and a high-level Russian agent that agent’s identity is what Dominika has to discover, in her guise as an embassy translator. Her first target is Nate Nash (Edgerton), a CIA operative now in Budapest. After some qualms, Dominika accepts, and undergoes training designed to remove all her inhibitions.

He offers her a job as a “sparrow”, honey-potting foreigners in order to obtain intelligence from them. Living in a Bolshoi-provided apartment and with a sick mother, things look bleak until her uncle Ivan Egorov (Schoenaerts) steps in.

#REVIEWS OF RED SPARROW SOFTWARE#

While this is supposedly set in the present day – I say that, because at one point, cutting-edge computer software is delivered on a set of floppy disks! – this feels more like something born out of Peak Cold War.īallerina Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) suffers an accident on stage that ends her career. But now, those pesky Russkies are back as the bad guys once again, following their interference in the sacrosanct and solemn process of Americans electing a president. No longer the “Evil Empire” of the Reagan era, they had largely been replaced, in the post 9/11 landscape, by Islamic fundamentalism. There was a while there, where Russia dropped out of the top spot as far as being cinematic villains were concerned.

“The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!”

Reviews of red sparrow