SPARROW NOTHING TO TWEET ABOUT
Jennifer Lawrence plays it cool, but this spy drama gets cold quickly
If you search the internet for the airspeed of a house sparrow (not an African swallow — settle down, Python fans!) you will find it tops out at a respectable
46 km/ h.
Red Sparrow places a distant second.
Adapted by Justin Haythe (The Lone Ranger, A Cure for Wellness) from the 2013 novel by Jason Matthews, the movie walks when it should fly, and stumbles instead of darting.
This modern spy story adopts the slow pace of the pre-digital Cold War, but with none of its cool fashion or design sense.
There are still some pleasures to be found, not least from its sprawling, first-rate cast.
Jennifer Lawrence, stumbling a bit herself these days in Mother! and Passengers, stars as Dominika Egorova, a Russian
ballerina whose career comes to a crashing halt after an onstage accident.
She is recruited by her skeevy uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts) and enrolled in the Red Sparrow school, where the headmistress (a delightfully frosty Charlotte Rampling) tells her students: “You must learn to love on command,” and teaches the weaponization of emotions for use in espionage, or what they used to call a “honey trap.”
Her American counterpart (roughly speaking) is Nate Nash, played by Joel Edgerton. While Dominika was watching her future disappear on the stage, Nate was compromising his identity to protect that of a Russian mole. Months later, he returns to work in Budapest, hoping to reconnect with the mole. Dominika is sent to learn what she can.
Of course, they fall in love. Or wait — do they? We see both Nate and Dominika meeting with their superiors (Jeremy Irons and Ciarán Hinds make frighteningly effective Russians) about how they’re going to learn each other’s secrets. But this is a movie about deception, double-crosses and maybe even that Tim Hortons specialty, the double doublecross. Lawrence is particularly fun to watch in this game. She’s so icy-cool, I swear she shut herself in a freezer between takes.
Under the control of Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence (no relation to Jennifer), Red Sparrow has all the makings of a superior spy thriller. But the film wastes far too much time before bringing its main pieces into play with one another — stately travelling shots, needless establishing shots, subplots, minor characters, exposition, etc.
And there’s no sense of variety in the pacing — everything happens to the same metronome beat, whether it’s Dominika’s dealings with her Moscow bosses, her Budapest roommate or the local bureau chief, a real Soviet-era chauvinist who seems to think that #MeToo is what you say when you hear that other spymasters have been harassing their staff members.
Edgerton’s unshowy performance almost gets lost in the mix, which is a pity because the acting is the best thing about Red Sparrow. But rather than even let that stand on its own, the movie suddenly panics as it nears the two-hour mark, injecting some hard-to-watch torture scenes and a bizarre subplot featuring Mary-Louise Parker as a boozy U.S. diplomat with a secret to sell.
It makes for a much-needed change of pace, but it’s too late for an espionage drama that starts out Cold War and ends up merely cold.